Fig. 1: Study design, analysis plan, and exercise-induced immune cell mobilization.

A Overview of the study design, including time- and workload-matched high-intensity interval exercise (HIIE) and moderate-intensity continuous exercise (MICE). B Overview of the bioanalytical and bioinformatic methods used to analyze peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs). C Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) of immune cell clusters identified by unsupervised clustering using self-organizing maps (SOM). Immune cell clusters are displayed color-coded and separated by exercise condition and measurement time point. Each UMAP corresponds to 3000 vital lymphocytes from 22 samples, resulting in a total of 66,000 events. For the UMAP representing 1 h post MICE, only 21 samples were available, resulting in 63,000 events. D Comparison of exercise-induced shifts in the identified clusters. E Proportions of lymphocyte subsets in response to HIIE and MICE. See also Supplementary Fig. S1 and Supplementary Data S2, S3, and S4. Created in BioRender. Walzik, D. (2025) https://BioRender.com/y85v219.