Abstract:
Aerobic and anaerobic exercises are important components for improving health related
physical fitness variables. The purpose of this study was to find out the effects of selected
aerobic and anaerobic workouts on performance improvement of health related physical
fitness variables among Under 17 Athletes of Harar City, Eastern Ethiopia. To achieve this
purpose of the study 32 (16 male,16 female) under 17 handball athletes were Harar city
Simple randomly selected from Hakim woreda handball project as a subject and their age
were >= 15 and under 17 years. They were assigned into two groups, aerobic group(8 male
,8 female) and anaerobic group(8 male,8 female). Each group consisted of 16 subjects. All
groups participated in supervised aerobic and anaerobic workouts 3 days/week for 12 weeks.
The parameters selected for the study were muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility
,Cardiorespiratory and body composition. Pre, during and post test were conducted for all 32
subjects on all health related physical fitness variables and the score were recorded. Data
were analyzed using among each group through the use of independent T-tests and one-way
analysis of variance /ANOVA/. The result obtained in this study indicate that there was
significant improvement in health related physical fitness variables due to the effects of
selected aerobic and anaerobic training (p≤0.05). This study also proved that, aerobic
exercise was significantly better than anaerobic in improving muscular endurance,
Cardiorespiratory endurance and flexibility and anaerobic exercise was significantly better
than aerobic exercise in improving muscular strength. While both exercises had almost the
same effect on body composition of the participants and the improvement on health related
physical fitness variables(muscular strength, muscular endurance and Cardiorespiratory
endurance) on male players was significantly better than their females. Whereas better
improvement was observed on female on health related physical fitness variable( flexibility)
than male players.
