Introduction
Motivation
During the COVID‑19 pandemic, many people reported struggling to exercise with masks, and media stories even described collapses during workouts. This raised practical questions: do masks make exercise unsafe, and do they meaningfully reduce performance, especially at higher intensities?
At the same time, there were many different mask types (surgical, cloth, FFP2/N95 respirators) and very different users, from sedentary population to well‑trained athletes. As the physiological demands of athletes may push breathing systems toward their limits more than those of sedentary adults, adding a mask could, in theory, affect them differently from sedentary people.
Ultimately, our project aims to move beyond anecdotes by aggregating published data to assess how masks influence key physiological, performance and psychological outcomes during exercise across mask types and subgroups.
Acknowledgement
Our dataset is built on top of an existing systematic review by Zheng et al. that pulled together 45 studies with 1,264 participants to compare between “mask-on” and “mask-off” effects during various types of exercise.
We are grateful for the support by Ms. Qinqin Zhang and Ms. Cheryl Lee from the CUHK Library Research Data Team, Dr. Kwong Cheong Wong from the Data Science and Policy Studies program, as well as Ms. Jiaqi Zhang and Dr. Eric Tsz-Chun Poon from the Department of Sports Science and Physical Education, CUHK.