EFFECTS OF ROPE SKIPPING ON VISCERAL FAT OF FEMALE ADOLESCENTS IN MAKURDI, NIGERIA

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of rope-skipping on visceral fat of female adolescents in Makurdi, Nigeria.
To achieve this purpose, the pretest-posttest control group was adopted in this study; the population for the study was 334
female adolescent students of St. Dominic’s High School, Makurdi. Multi-stage sampling technique was used for this study.
The six (6) existing classes of the school served as strata. Purposive sampling technique was used to select only female
adolescent students, whose BMI ranges between 85th and 95th percentile of Body mass index (overweight) and 13-19 years
old respectively. Simple random sampling techniques of deep and pick with replacement was used in selecting five (5)
students from each class. Therefore, total of (30) participants were selected and used for this study. They were randomly
assigned into either control group (n = 15) or experimental group (n = 15), in the course of the training, two (2) were dropped
out as a result of inconsistency of training attendance and one (1) dropped as a result of parental influence. Thus, twenty-
seven (27) participants were used for this study. The experimental group performed rope skipping training three (3) times in a
week for eight (8) weeks, while the control group did not take any form of training. Prior to and after the training, waist-hip
ratio (WHR) was measured in centimeters (cm), using a flexible anthropometric tape. The data collected were analysed using
descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation to describe the physical characteristics of participants and the hypotheses
were tested using student's independent t-test at significant level of 0.05, the statistical package for the social sciences (IBM
SPSS®) for windows version 21 was used to analyse the data. The results of the study revealed that eight (8) weeks of rope-
skipping significantly reduced WHR (P < 0.05) of female adolescents in Makurdi. Based on the findings of this study, it was
concluded that rope-skipping exercise significantly reduced WHR which is an index measure of visceral fat of female
adolescents in Makurdi, Nigeria. It was therefore recommended that; female adolescents should regularly engage in rope
skipping as an exercise to positively improve their physiological parameters.