Bibliometric Review to Explore Emerging High-Intensity Interval Training in Health Promotion: A New Century Picture

Abstract

Background: High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is an emerging exercise strategy and is considered to be a recipe for health promotion. This study aimed to systematically identify collaboration networks, track research trends, highlight current hotspots, and predict future frontiers in HIIT and its applications in health promotion since the start of the new century.Methods: Relevant original publications were obtained from the Science Citation Index Expanded of the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database between 2001 and 2020. CiteSpace and VOSviewer software were used to perform bibliometric visualization and comparative analysis of involved indexes that included countries, institutions, journals, authors, references, and keywords.Results: A total of 572 papers were included, and the trend of annual publications showed a remarkable growth. The United States and the University of Exeter were the most productive country and institutions, respectively, with 107 and 18 publications, respectively. European Journal of Applied Physiology took the lead in the number of published articles, and Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise ranked first in the cocitation counts. Barker AR and Gibala MJ were considered as the most productive and the most highly-cited authors.Conclusions: “Health risks,” “adolescent,” and “aging” are the three noteworthy topics during the evolution of HIIT-health promotion (HIIT-HP) research. The current research hotspots of HIIT and its practices in the health promotion domain lies in “metabolic diseases,” “cardiovascular diseases,” “neurological diseases,” and “musculoskeletal diseases.” The authors summarize that “prevention and rehabilitation,” “micro and molecular level,” and “cognition and mental health” are becoming frontiers and focus on the health topics related to HIIT in the upcoming years, which are worthy of further exploration.

No Change in Inhibitory Control or P3 Following Different High-Intensity Interval Exercise Modalities

“…Another possible explanation for this lack of replication of previous behavioral results concerns individual differences in psychological factors related to mental context experienced prior to and during the exercise bout (e.g., incompetence, affect, motivation and self-efficacy). HIIE exercise is a difficult routine to accomplish, especially for those unfamiliar or inexperienced, and this may increase heterogeneity in psychological preferences and attitudes toward the task [ 41 ]. This assertion is supported by emerging evidence suggesting that individual differences in cognitive and affective mood states moderate psychological performance following the exercise bout [ 24 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 ].…”

Physical Exercise in the Context of Air Pollution: An Emerging Research Topic

“…Several reasons justified the selection of the WoS database in this research. As noted, the WoSCC remains as the standard database for knowledge-map-based analysis (Meho and Yang, 2007 ), which has been applied in a number of bibliometric studies (Mao et al, 2018 ; Martinho, 2019 ; Yan et al, 2020 ; You et al, 2021a , b ). In addition, the WoSCC is a multidisciplinary database and includes literature on environmental science and public health emerging from distinctive research areas and disciplines published in more than 20,000 journals.…”

“…To avoid bias, all hits were retrieved as “full-record and cited-references” files from WoSCC on August 12, 2021 for further analysis. Referring to the previous pieces of research (Yan et al, 2020 ; You et al, 2021a , c ), we only selected “articles or reviews” for analysis, and the language was limited to “English”; other document types and non-English articles were excluded. The reason for setting the time range in the new century was that few publications related to AP-PE were produced before year 2001.…”

Trends in Research on Traditional Chinese Health Exercises for Improving Cognitive Function: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Literature From 2001 to 2020

“…In addition, both medium-and high-intensity exercise have been proven to provide multiple health benefits, and even low-intensity exercise is associated with significant health benefits in older adults (58). Some studies suggest that highintensity interval training (HITT) can induce more significant improvements in cognitive function than moderate-intensity continuous training (59)(60)(61). HITT is an emerging training method used in exercise prescription and complementary therapy for the rehabilitation of patients with related chronic diseases (60).…”

“…Some studies suggest that highintensity interval training (HITT) can induce more significant improvements in cognitive function than moderate-intensity continuous training (59)(60)(61). HITT is an emerging training method used in exercise prescription and complementary therapy for the rehabilitation of patients with related chronic diseases (60). But at the same time, HITT can be difficult and may even lead to sports injuries or increase negative emotions in beginners, which is not conducive to long-term practice (62).…”