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

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.