The Effects of Exercise Training on Plasma Volume Variations: A Systematic Review

The aim of this systematic review was to summarize the evidence on the acute and long-term effects of exercise training on PV, in both trained and untrained individuals and to examine associations between changes in %PVV and change in physical/physiological performance. Despite the status of participants and the exercise duration or intensity, all the acute studies reported a significant decrease of PV (effect size: 0.85<d<3.45, very large), and ranged between 7 and 19.9%. In untrained individuals, most of studies reported a significant increase of PV in response to different kind of training including endurance training and high intensity interval training (effect size: 0.19<d<3.52, small to very large), and ranged from 6.6 to 16%. However, in trained individuals the results are equivocal. We showed that acute exercise appears to induce a significant decrease of PV in both healthy untrained and trained individuals in response to several exercise modalities. Moreover, there is evidence that long-term exercise training induced a significant increase of PV in healthy untrained individuals. However, it seems that there is no consensus concerning the effect of long-term exercise training on PV in trained individuals.