Abstract
Introduction: In the sports medicine setting, many of the established positive health benefits of exercise have been documented by historic discoveries in the field of exercise physiology. Mitochondrial function is critical in regulating all three of the classic physiological factors that limit endurance performance. Objective: It was to carry out a systematic review to present the main information on exercise physiology in the light of mitochondrial redox activities in sports performance, as well as the guidelines of sports medicine in this regard. Methods: The systematic review rules of the PRISMA Platform were followed. The search was carried out from August to September 2023 in the Scopus, PubMed, Science Direct, Scielo, and Google Scholar databases, using articles dated from 2008 to 2023. The quality of the studies was based on the GRADE instrument and the risk of bias was analyzed according to the Cochrane instrument. Results and Conclusion: A total of 200 articles were found, and of the 77 articles were evaluated in full and 32 were included and developed in this systematic review study. Considering the Cochrane tool for risk of bias, the overall assessment resulted in 37 studies with a high risk of bias and 78 studies that did not meet GRADE. It was concluded that sports physicians may seek to use an increasing number of non-invasive techniques to study muscle metabolic functioning, answering how mitochondrial networks interact with O2 kinetics, how to remodel mitochondrial networks to increase performance, and how training affects the interaction between glycogen/lipid storage site and mitochondrial networks. Physiological and psychological demands during training and competition generate fatigue and reduce an athlete's sport-specific performance capacity. The magnitude of this decrease depends on several characteristics of the exercise stimulus, such as type, duration, and intensity, as well as on individual characteristics, such as physical conditioning, profile, and fatigue resistance. Recent evidence suggests that exercise-induced reactive species are essential upstream signals for the activation of redox-sensitive transcription factors and the induction of exercise-associated gene expression. Free radicals and oxidative stress are increasingly included in major reviews of exercise physiology as regulators of responses and adaptations.