Teens who regularly play football are more focused

A direct correlation has been found between teens who play football and their ability to maintain focus, the Catholic University of Valencia and the Granada Center for Brain, Mind and Behavior Research, or Cimcyc, revealed in a recent study.

The University of Granada, which oversees Cimcyc, announced on Tuesday the findings of a study that sampled 75 male and female adolescents, half of whom played football regularly, reports Efe.

The subjects took questionnaires and performed tests to determine their aerobic fitness, in addition to undergoing a task specifically designed to assess alertness and sustained attention.

The results showed that the football players had better aerobic fitness than those who did not play, unsurprisingly, but more importantly, they had better reaction times in the alertness task, "which shows a better ability to maintain focused attention," Daniel Sanabria, a Cimcyc researcher and co-author of the study, discussed.

The authors of the study pointed to factors that could explain the results, such as the perceptual and motor skills demonstrated by the athletes as compared to the others.