Abstract
The influence of physical activity on brain and heart activity dependent on type and intensity of exercise is meanwhile widely accepted. Mainly cyclic exercises with longer duration formed the basis for showing the influence on either central nervous system or on heart metabolism. Effects of the variability of movement sequences on brain and heart have been studied only sparsely so far. This study investigated effects of three different motor learning approaches combined with a single bout of rope skipping exercises on the spontaneous electroencephalographic (EEG) brain activity, heart rate variability (HRV) and the rate of perceived exertion (RPE). Participants performed repetitive learning (RL) and two extremely variable rope skipping schedules according to the differential learning approach. Thereby one bout was characterized by instructed variable learning (DLi) and the other by self-created variable learning (DLc) in randomized order each on three consecutive days. The results show higher RPE after DLi and DLc than after RL. HRV analysis demonstrates significant changes in pre–post exercise comparison in all training approaches. No statistically significant differences between training schedules were identified. Slightly greater changes in HRV parameters were observed in both DL approaches indicating a higher activation of the sympathetic nervous system. EEG data reveals higher parietal alpha1 and temporal alpha2 power in RL compared to both DL schedules immediately post exercise. During the recovery of up to 30 min, RL shows higher temporal and occipital theta, temporal, parietal and occipital alpha, temporal and occipital beta and frontal beta3 power. In conclusion, already a single bout of 3 min of rope skipping can lead to brain states that are associated with being advantageous for cognitive learning. Combined with additional, cognitively demanding tasks in form of the DL approach, it seems to lead to an overload of the mental capacity, at least on the short term. Further research should fathom the reciprocal influence of cardiac and central-nervous strain in greater detail.
Highlights
Analyzing effects of physical activity (PA) on cognition or related brain activity has received increasing interest over the past decades (Etnier et al, 1997; Crabbe and Dishman, 2004; Chang et al, 2012b; Cox et al, 2016)
The results showed enhanced frontal theta activity and occipitoparietal and central alpha activity following differential learning (DL) compared to repetitive learning (RL) (Henz and Schöllhorn, 2016)
This study aimed to investigate and compare the influence of different, coordination related motor learning approaches combined with a medium physical load on EEG brain activity, metabolism (HRV) and rate of perceived exertion (RPE)
Summary
Analyzing effects of physical activity (PA) on cognition or related brain activity has received increasing interest over the past decades (Etnier et al, 1997; Crabbe and Dishman, 2004; Chang et al, 2012b; Cox et al, 2016). Hereby the focus was in majority on the behavioral effects of acute (Tomporowski, 2003; Crabbe and Dishman, 2004; Budde et al, 2008; Schneider et al, 2009a,b; Brümmer et al, 2011a; Pesce and Audiffren, 2011; Chang et al, 2012a, 2014; McMorris et al, 2015), and chronic exercise (Etnier et al, 1997; Cox et al, 2016) dependent on the intensity, duration and type of movement. Quite recently the studies became more concentrated on the consequences of PA on brain activity
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