Report for my participants, part 1

I wrote up a version of my results for my participants to read and learn about how their assessments turned out collectively. It turned out to be 13 pages long, when I had hoped to keep it around 6, but I guess I had a lot to say. I'll publish this in 2 parts: the intro/stats/dry boring bits first, than the interesting and applied discussion section second. Part 1 after the jump.

Report for Participants in Eric Martin’s Research

Outline of this report

            This report is written specifically for you, the men and women who participated in my research. I would like to thank each and every one of you for joining my program. I truly enjoyed getting to know everyone, and had a lot of fun coaching you.

In this report, I have not used normal academic conventions, such as referencing, to keep things simple and brief (though it’s still pretty long). I am happy to provide the full scholarly report if you are interested.

First I have presented the purpose and methods of the study, which you may have been unaware of. Next, I have displayed results of the study as they stand alone. These first two sections are fairly dry, so feel free to skip to the end of page 5 if you want to just read about the main results and their meaning to your health. Lastly, I have provided some recommendations for your future health.

Purpose and Methods

            The research purpose was to compare high and low intensity exercise. This was done in the context of an intervention that combined exercise, counselling (supportive group psychotherapy), and behavioural advice. Except for the intensity and amount of exercise, all things were equal. The high intensity group (HIG) performed 80% of the volume of aerobic exercise as the low intensity group (LIG). For example, if the LIG exercised for 10 minutes, the HIG exercised for only 8 minutes. This was done to make the two groups equal on how many calories they would burn during aerobic exercise (this is a common practice in exercise physiology research when comparing different intensities).

            The table below shows what groups were supposed to do, and what they actually did, in terms of exercise intensity. A quick lesson on exercise prescription: Aerobic exercise is synonymous with cardiovascular exercise. Resistance exercise is usually strength training. Low intensity exercise is classified as 45-60% of maximum. Moderate intensity exercise is 61-75% of maximum, and high intensity exercise is 76-90% max.

	Prescribed Aerobic Exercise	Actual Aerobic Exercise	Prescribed Resistance Exercise	Actual Resistance Exercise
LIG	60-65%	60%	50-65%	60%
HIG	75-80%	70%	65-80%	80%

            As you can see from the table, the LIG stayed within their targets. The HIG was lower than targeted on their aerobic exercise, but maxed out their resistance exercise. You will see this reflected in the results. One important thing to note is that both groups fell within the moderate intensity category for aerobic exercise. There is a definite threshold between the categories, i.e. being on the high end of moderate is not significantly better than being on the low end of moderate.

            One interesting note is that on average, all participants rated the sessions as a difficulty of 3-4 out of 10, which described the sessions as moderate to somewhat hard. This means that everyone perceived the difficulty of the sessions similarly, even though objectively they were significantly different.

            I did not tell anybody about the true nature of the experiment, nor which group they were assigned to. Reflecting on your experience, however, perhaps you can guess which group you were in. Here are the group assignments according to course date and times if you want to double check. Participants from 2010 were involved in the pilot work, and were not subjected to intensity groupings.

High intensity groups	Low intensity groups
Men’s May-July 2011	Women’s May-July 2011
Men’s July-September 2011, 7.30am	Men’s July-September 2011, 8.30am
Men’s October-December 2011, 9.00am	Women’s July-September 2011
Women’s October-December 2011, evening	Men’s October-December 2011, 9.00am
Women’s February-April 2012	Women’s October-December 2011, 10.30am
Men’s May-June 2012	Both men’s groups, Feb-March 2012

Results

Aerobic Fitness: both groups improved their fitness the same amount, but the LIG returned to baseline levels by the follow up assessment while the HIG maintained their improved fitness level.

 

Body fat: The HIG lost more body fat than the LIG during the intervention, and continued to lose body fat until the follow up. The LIG lost some body fat during the intervention, but did not shed any more fat by follow up.

Strength: The HIG made 20% more improvement than the LIG during the intervention, which was the same difference as the amount of resistance training performed. In the whole experiment, this was the only outcome to work out mathematically perfectly. By the follow up assessment, the groups had become statistically similar. This is also expected, as maximal strength is a very specific component of fitness that must be constantly trained for. Overall, people were 40% stronger at follow up than baseline. This is a fantastic result for both groups, and better than expected. It indicates how hard everyone worked to become stronger and keep up with their exercises.

 

Exercise motivation: Both groups improved their exercise motivation during the intervention, but the HIG maintained their motivation while the LIG returned to pre intervention levels.

Other results:

• Body weight did not significantly change during the intervention.
• While flexibility did improve, there was no difference between groups. Also, lower back and hamstring flexibility (the sit and reach test) was poor for most people at all points. This is an area for most people to continue to work on.
• Quality of life: most people rated their quality of life as high at the beginning of the study. There was a statistically significant improvement for all people, however, because the scores started so high it was not a large improvement, as many people couldn’t get much better on these questionnaires.
• Fatigue: most people were not experiencing fatigue, so like with the quality of life questionnaires, this improved statistically, but was not meaningful.