Abstract 1 Effect of a 15 week endurance strength and concur

Abstract #1: Effect of a 15 week endurance, strength and concurrent training resistance training program on strength and muscular endurance in high school boys Four groups of high school boys (n 12 per group) were tested on strength (1RM) and muscular endurance (time to exhaustion using 50% of 1RM) before and after a 15- week training program of 50 minutes per day for 3 days per week. All groups used an isotonic device for training and testing. The strength-training group (ST used a workout involving three arm and three leg exercises (10 sets of 3 repetitions) with resistance levels set at 80% of 1RM. The endurance-training group (E)used the same exercises, except resistance was set at 50% of 1RM and 3 sets of 10 repetitions were used. A combination group (C) used the same exercises but did 1 set of 3 repetitions at 80% of 1RM and 2 sets of 10 repetitions at 50% of 1RM. A control group (CG) was tested before and after 15 weeks. Significant differences in strength gains were found favoring the ST group when compared with the ET and the CG groups. The ET group had greater gains in muscular endurance than the ST and the CG groups. The CT group had greater gains in strength and endurance than the CG group, but gains in strength or endurance were not different from the ST and ET groups.

Solution

Two extraneous variables in the study are:

1. Strength and endurance levels of students before the test may be different which is an important confounder to the results. This extraneous variable was minimized by testing the students before and after the test, however, the fact remains the same that the students differ in their strength and endurance prior to the test.

2. The students were not randomly distributed in the groups. When group distribution is not random, there are chances that strong students would be more in any one group. If this happens, it would skew the results. In case if students would have distributed randomly between the groups, they would increase the size of the error in the observation. This is second extraneous variable in the study.