Nowadays, obesity has turned into a widespread public health trouble all over the world. People who are overweight or obese are not only prone to various chronic physical illnesses, but also easily trapped in bad mental states such as poor self-evaluation, frequent mood swings, inner restlessness and poor interpersonal communication ability, which will greatly lower their overall living satisfaction. Traditional weight-loss exercise modes are mostly monotonous and lack fun, so most people cannot keep doing them for a long time, and the actual weight control effect is far from ideal. Mini basketball matches, which feature strong entertainment value, easy interaction among participants, flexible arrangement forms and proper exercise intensity, have gradually become a practical way to help obese people improve their physical and mental state. This paper sorts out relevant research findings to analyze the actual effects of taking part in mini basketball games on obese people’s physical health, mental mood and long-term sports persistence, and sums up the main elements that will change the intervention effect as well as the existing research defects. The research data adopted in this paper are all collected from academic databases including PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar and CNKI, with the research time range set from 2010 to 2025. After strict screening and elimination of unqualified documents, a total of 18 practical experimental research papers are selected for content sorting and result analysis. It is found that regular participation in mini basketball games can effectively cut down excess body fat, strengthen cardiopulmonary function and raise daily activity volume of obese groups. In terms of mental adjustment, this kind of group sports can help participants build more self-confidence, form a more objective view of their own figure, ease inner negative emotions, and meanwhile stimulate their inner enthusiasm for sports and promote daily social communication. The final intervention effect will be affected by the duration of sports intervention, weekly practice times, participants’ age groups and different match modes such as one-on-one, two-on-two, three-on-three and four-on-four. In general, longer intervention cycles and reasonable weekly exercise frequency can bring more stable positive changes to individuals. At present, related academic research still has obvious shortcomings: there is no unified standard for specific experimental operation schemes, long-term follow-up observation data is insufficient, and research perspectives are relatively single. In practical application, mini basketball sports intervention is easy to carry out and well accepted by the public, which can be widely used in community health management, campus physical education courses and daily rehabilitation training work. Follow-up research needs to formulate unified and standardized experimental implementation standards, and further explore the deep-seated action principles behind this sports intervention mode.

Jinling Chen, Asmadi bin Ishak. Effect of small-sided basketball games on physical and psychological outcomes for obese population intervention. Frontiers in Sport Research (2026), Vol. 8, Issue 3: 37-42. https://doi.org/10.25236/FSR.2026.080306.

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