Protocol for cardiac assessment of recreational athletes

In this work, the development of a database on physical fitness is presented. As initial population to fill this database, people who practice recreational sports at the Universidad Simon Bolivar (USB) were chosen. The goal was studying individual physical fitness in order to structure exercise routines that gives certain benefits without risking the individual health, promoting a less sedentary way of life. Before the study, a low-cost noninvasive protocol was designed to determine the level of physical fitness. The methodology consisted of four steps: a) A review of existing protocols to propose a set of physical fitness (International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ)), cardiovascular (heart rate variability, heart rate recovery time and arterial blood pressure), anthropomorphic, aerobic (maximum oxygen consumption) and mood state (Profile of Mood State (POMS)) measurements, which allow sketching a complete profile on the sportsman physical fitness. b) Instrumental data collection. c) Electrocardiographic signal processing. d) Data post-processing using multivariate analysis. The database was composed of 26 subject from USB. Ten subjects were soccer players, ten were mountain climbers and six were sedentary people. Results showed that the heart rate recover time after 2-3 min, IPAQ and maximum oxygen consumption have higher weights for classifying individuals according to their habitual physical activity. Heart rate variability, as well as, POMS did not contribute greatly for discriminating recreational sport from sedentary persons.