Interventions
VF
AT and AT + CT were performed twice a week for 14 weeks in two phases: a 2-week familiarization period followed by a 14-week training period. Exercise sessions lasted approximately 30 min, including a 10-min warm-up, a 15-min exercise session (main part), and a 5-min cooldown. All sessions were conducted in groups of two or three people, with a distance of 2 m between the participants to avoid training interference. The participants of the AT + CT group were assigned the same cognitive task but in a different order. An agility ladder adapted from sports training was used in exercise sessions (Agility ladder with a length of 4.8 m and 12 rungs (40 cm × 40 cm).The familiarization period was designed to adapt participants to the laboratory setting, exercise sequences, and perception of effort (rating of perceived exertion). Participants were instructed to perform each exercise sequence round trip on the agility ladder for 30 s.The duration of each session was equal for both groups (AT and AT + CT). Participants completed the same exercise sequence during the familiarization period. At week 6, the exercise difficulty was increased by substituting sequences 2A and 3A for 2B and 3B, respectively, and at week 10, difficulty increased by adding 30 s to each sequence (Exercise sets. Each exercise session (e.g., sequence A) included four subsets, each with a 30-s exercise period and a 15-s rest.Participants performed four sequences 1, 2 (2A or 2B), 3 (3A or 3B), and 4 for 30 s each, followed by 15 s of rest (Training sessions outlook.Sequence (combination of the footsteps on the ladder) = 1, 2 (2A or 2B), 3 (3A or 3B).The AT + CT group performed agility training concurrently with a cognitive task (e.g., VF). The participants were instructed to say aloud as many words of a specific category as possible in each subset. The difficulty level of the cognitive task was increased monthly by changing word categories, from general to specific, while phonemic (e.g., words beginning with vowels letters and consonants) or semantic (e.g., people names, sports, clothes, male names, aquatic sports, and winter clothes) categories were changed in each subset (Examples of semantic (e.g., 1st set—color and 2nd set—country) and phonological (e.g., 3rd set—M letter and 4th set—R letter) categories used for the verbal fluency test.