Home-based Bodyweight Training: An Emergency Approach to Enhance Students' Quality of Life

A sedentary lifestyle declines quality of life and would be a critical threat to the future. Planning for post-COVID life must be a strategy during confinement. In this paper, we aimed to investigate the effect of home-based training as an available program on students' quality of life.

This was a quasi-experimental study with a pretest-posttest design. The participants were selected from male high school students in Tehran, Iran, during 2020-2021. Thirty high school students were randomly assigned to home-based training (HBT, n=15) and non-exercise control group (CG, n=15). Simple random sampling method was used to randomly assign the study participants to test and control groups. HBT was performed four times a week, 60 minutes per session, for eight weeks. The short version of the World Health Organization Quality of Life (QoL) instrument was used to evaluate QoL, covering four domains: self-perceived physical health, psychological health, social relationships, and environment. Following the confirmation of data normality via the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, ANCOVA was employed to assess training effectiveness, and Levene's test was used to verify variance homogeneity assumptions.

After post-test, mean self-perceived physical health (CG) stood at (60.91±14.81), markedly lower than that of the HBT group (86.14±12.54) (P=0.001). Furthermore, mean psychological health in the CG and HBT groups were (54.03±23.98) and (73.49±14.28), respectively, exhibiting statistical significance (P=0.001). However, no remarkable changes occurred in the social (P=0.992) and environmental domain (P=0.146) after training protocol. None of the variables exhibited significant alterations in the CG group.

Noticeable outcomes of home-based bodyweight training discerned in the physical, psychological, and general domain of QoL after the program. It is suggested to evaluate other aspects of students' lives like home-based family training to make a passable bridge from COVID-pandemic to post-COVID life.