ABSTRACT
The wide spectrum of health benefits of recreational football have been extensively documented. The intermittent high-intensity stochastic nature and the intrinsic social interactions of recreational football is deemed to be the cause of the positive effects on players’ health and wellness, and it is therefore of interest to investigate other team sports. Descriptive and training studies confirmed the interest of team sports played at recreational level in the quest for novel motivating exercise models to improve health and to promote active lifestyles of sedentary individuals of different age, sex, experience level and health status. Training studies suggest recreational team handball, floorball, basketball and rugby union as viable alternatives or complements to football in improving physical fitness and health markers in different populations. These encouraging results warrant investigations replicating those for recreational football, aiming at prompting the implementation of team sports as health-enhancing interventions worldwide. The potential audience for the recreational team sports participation is amazing, with an estimated 100 million basketball players and 70 million team handball players that potentially add to the 500 million football players. With even bigger numbers, if the implementation of other structured and unstructured ball-games are added. In this chapter, the available published literature on recreational team sports will be scrutinised and lines for future studies will be proposed.
