Abstract:
The purpose of this quasi-experimental research was to develop a general gymnastics model to promote health status and health related physical fitness of elderly women. Samples in this study were 32 elderly women, 60⁺ years of age, randomly allocated, 16 each, to experimental and control groups. Research instruments were data recording form of health status and health-related physical fitness and equipments for examining health status, testing of health-related physical fitness and for experimental purposes. the quality of the model and instruments were evaluated by 7 experts for quality-content validity and Index of Objective-Item Congruence. The experimental periods were 12 weeks. The collected data were then analyzed for evaluating model. The descriptive statistics was used to find percentages, means, and standard deviations. The inferential statistics was also employed for hypotheses testing by using independent t-test, repeated measures one- way ANOVA, if the ANOVA null hypothesis of equal means had been rejected the Fisher's LSD method would be used for comparing treatment group means at the level of the statistical significance at .05. It was found that: The developed general gymnastics model to promote health status and health-related physical fitness of elderly women was appropriate in accordance with principles and philosophy of general gymnastics and sports science. It included the Orientation phase, Baseline data collecting phase, Determining phase, Exercise phase with ball and ribbon, and Assessment and evaluation phase of health status and health-related physical fitness. It could be well used to promote health status and health-related physical fitness of elderly women. There was statistically significant difference of the elderly women health status at the .05 level in terms of Heart Rate, DBP, and BMI among before, after 6[superscript th] week, and after 12[superscript th] week of experiments. With regard to health-related physical fitness: Body composition, muscular endurance, right-hand muscular strength, and the cardiorespiratory endurance were statistically significant different before, after 6[superscript th] week, and after 12[superscript th] week of experiments at the level of .05. In conclusion, health status and health-related physical fitness of experimental group were better than control group significantly at the level of .05