Motivos da adesão de idosos ao programa de exercícios físicos oferecidos nos núcleos do Rio Ar Livre do município do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Nowadays, there are many programs that offer physical exercise for elderly people. In Rio de Janeiro, there is the Rio Ar Livre (RAL) program, which is offered free of charge by the city administration in public areas of the city. Considering the importance of adherence to physical exercise in order for the expected benefits to occur, the general objective of this study was to verify the reasons behind the adherence of elderly people to the exercise program that is offered in the RALs in the city of Rio de Janeiro. In order to attain said objective, two studies were conducted, as follows: a) a systematic review of the existing literature on the subject, with the goal of identifying the reasons behind old people adhering to and dropping out of free exercise programs. The searches were conducted in Portuguese and in English in the Scielo, SPORTdiscus and Pubmed databases. After a triage, ten articles were included in the review and analyzed regarding the characteristics of the subjects, the type of program that was analyzed, how the data collection was conducted and what reasons were found for the old people to adhere and give up on the programs; and b) original field research with the objective of finding out the reasons for elderly people to adhere to the exercise program offered by the RALs in the city of Rio de Janeiro. 396 elderly people, male and female and aged sixty years or more were interviewed in 58 RAL locations, representing the programmatic regions of Rio de Janeiro. The data was collected with a questionnaire validated by Castro (2004) and analyzed with descriptive statistics. We concluded that the main reasons that are behind elderly people joining public exercise programs are related to healthcare, but the reasons related to adherence have more to do with the pleasure that these people perceive, indicating that the quality of the program is important in order to guarantee the adherence of this population to regular exercising.