Acute affective responses to interactive, coactive, and hybrid exercises: A field study with amateur athletes.

Abstract

Positive emotional responses to exercise influence long-term participation and adherence, but it remains unclear whether affective benefits differ across exercise types that vary in social structure. This field study compared post-exercise (15 min) and 60-min post-exercise changes in affect across three habitual training groups - cheerleading (interactive), spinning (coactive), and karate (hybrid) - in 60 amateur athletes, using a repeated-measures design with sport group as a between-participants factor. Linear mixed-effects models adjusted for age, sex, training experience, weekly training volume, and session rating of perceived exertion showed a consistent main effect of time: positive affect increased and negative affect decreased after exercise, with concurrent increases in arousal and felt valence. One hour post-exercise, arousal fell below baseline, and positive and negative affect returned to baseline, whereas feeling state remained elevated. No statistically significant sports-group or sports-by-time effects were detected. This null result must be read within the study's limited sensitivity: the design was powered to detect only large between-group effects (Cohen's f ≥ 0.46), the 95% confidence intervals around between-group contrasts in change scores were compatible with standardized differences of up to approximately one standard deviation in either direction. Moreover, prespecified equivalence tests (two one-sided tests, bounds of ±0.5 SD) did not establish equivalence for any of the 24 contrasts examined. Acute affective improvement therefore accompanied all three training sessions, but the data do not support equivalence, and practically relevant small-to-moderate differences remain plausible. Because participants were not randomized and the groups differed in age, sex distribution, experience, and rated session intensity, the findings describe the sampled sport groups rather than causal effects of exercise structure. The sample was also predominantly female (49 of the 59 participants reporting sex), and menstrual-cycle phase, a plausible influence on affective valence, was neither recorded nor controlled.