Danes to play soccer at work

31 October 2008

That ‘all work and no play make Jack a dull boy’ has been known for ages. Now Danish research brings soccer into the workplace as a way to promote both health and social interaction.

A research team at the University of Copenhagen lead by Associate Professor Peter Krustrup has proved that soccer is an effective health promoting activity and in some aspects it is a more beneficial form of exercise than continuous running.

These results have now lead to a new research project in cooperation between Peter Krustrup, University of Copenhagen, and researcher Andreas Holtermann, National Research Centre for the Working Environment.

Soccer at the workplace

Around 70 % of all Danish companies offer some form of health promoting benefits to their employees. The benefits usually include such things as access to fruit/healthy food, exercise at work (or discounts on membership fees to fitness clubs and the like), quit-smoking programs, anti-stress programs and the like. So far, the emphasis has mostly been on the individual employee and there has been little or no documentation of how these benefits can relate to the company’s social capital (the interaction between co-workers, networking etc.).

Krustrup’s soccer vs. running experiment showed that besides the physiological improvements, soccer had a psychological and sociological advantage over running. Interviews with the men involved in the experiment testified that those in the soccer group generally found the exercise to be more fun and less hard than those in the running group. Furthermore, the soccer group showed a higher degree of motivation and even carried on playing soccer as a team after the experiment ended.

The new project will examine how soccer training at the workplace can promote both health and social capital. According to the plan, the researchers will launch a soccer training experiment at three large Danish companies in spring 2009. If the initial experiments seem promising, the next step is to expand the soccer training to other companies in Denmark and possibly the rest of Scandinavia.

The project will seek to document the following:

• Is 2 weekly 30 min soccer training sessions or 1 weekly 60 min training session sufficient to cause significant health effect?
• Can soccer training be integrated into the workplace in terms of being accepted and participated in by employees and at the same time improve their health? Is the soccer practice to
• How can soccer training be integrated into the workplace in terms of being accepted and participated in by employees and at the same time improve their health? Is the soccer practice to be planned in a particular way to achieve high attendance from certain groups of employees – e.g. women over 45 years of age, employees with high blood pressure, physical inactive or overweight employees?
• To what extent does soccer at the workplace change the lifestyle and self-image/confidence of the employees?
• To what extent can the health promoting effects of soccer be related to a possible decrease in absence due to illness, greater job satisfaction or the employees’ motivation, commitment and spirit?
• To what extent does soccer at the workplace increase the company’s social capital through improved social relations and greater level of confidence among co-workers?

The soccer vs. running experiment took place in 2007. Detailed results from the experiment will soon be published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.