2026-10-11T22:09:00Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33871699 2026-09-17T05:30:34Z category_427 portal_316 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

Data Sheet 1_Association between university aerobics course enrollment and changes in health-related physical fitness among college students: a retrospective cohort study.xlsx Jun Liang (251318) Yuanyuan Ma (280707) Public Health and Health Services not elsewhere classified campus health promotion course attendance health-related physical fitness physical education retrospective cohort study university aerobics Background<p>University aerobics is widely offered, but evidence comparing its real-world fitness outcomes with standard physical education (PE) using institutional records is limited. We examined whether enrollment in university aerobics was associated with greater 12-week improvement in health-related physical fitness than enrollment in standard PE and whether attendance was associated with fitness change.</p>Methods<p>This retrospective cohort study used PE, attendance, and fitness-testing records for 240 undergraduates (120 aerobics, 120 standard PE), randomly sampled at 30 students per class from eight existing class sections (four aerobics and four standard PE). Week-0 and week-12 post-session measurements of vital capacity, 50-m sprint, sit-and-reach, standing long jump, sex-specific endurance run, and BMI were used to construct a sex-standardized composite fitness z-score. Between-group differences were estimated using ANCOVA adjusted for baseline outcome value, sex, age, grade year, and baseline BMI (except for BMI), with class-cluster-robust standard errors; wild-cluster bootstrap and random-intercept models were used as sensitivity analyses. Complete-case analyses included 232 students (96.7%).</p>Results<p>The adjusted follow-up composite fitness score was 0.274 points higher in the aerobics group than in the standard PE group (cluster-robust 95% CI [0.225, 0.323]; d = 0.40). Cardiorespiratory endurance showed the largest secondary effect (d = 0.38), whereas standing long jump (d = 0.19), sit-and-reach (d = 0.17), 50-m sprint (d = −0.15), vital capacity (d = 0.10), and BMI (d = −0.08) showed small effects. Within the aerobics group, greater attendance was associated with greater composite fitness improvement (β = 0.050 points/session, 95% CI [0.028, 0.073]), although residual confounding cannot be excluded. No significant interactions by sex or baseline fitness were identified.</p>Conclusion<p>Enrollment in the studied aerobics sections was associated with greater fitness improvement than enrollment in the available standard PE sections. Because course enrollment was non-randomized, only eight sections were available, the comparison condition was incompletely characterized, and relevant pre-exposure confounders were unavailable, the findings should be considered hypothesis-generating rather than causal.</p> 2026-09-17T05:30:34Z Dataset Dataset 10.3389/fpubh.2026.1957753.s001 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Data_Sheet_1_Association_between_university_aerobics_course_enrollment_and_changes_in_health-related_physical_fitness_among_college_students_a_retrospective_cohort_study_xlsx/33871699 CC BY 4.0