Brain Jogging Exercise and Team and Individual Sports Athletes’
Concentration
Komarudin Komarudin
Faculty of Sport and Health Education, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Jln. Dr. Setiabudhi no.299 Bandung, Indonesia
komarudin_pko@upi.edu.
Keywords: Brain Jogging Exercise, Concentration, Team and Individual Sports.
Abstract: Concentration is the key to maximal performance because the athlete must focus on every task that needs to
be done. The concentration will be good if it is trained continuously through the right training method; one of
them is brain jogging. This study aims to determine the effect of brain jogging exercises on the athletes'
concentration of team sports and individuals. This research used experimental method with pretest-posttest
design. The population was UKM UPI athletes. The sample of this study were athletes who actively practiced
and competed on team and individual sports, which were taken with non-probability sampling technique. The
samples were divided into two groups: experiment and control, experimental group were treated with brain
jogging exercise 11 times twice a week. The control group was given brain jogging treatment. The instrument
to measure concentration is Concentration Grid Test (CGT). The data analysis technique used t test. The result
revealed that brain jogging exercises have a significant effect on the concentration of team and individual
sports athletes, and there are significant differences in the effects of brain jogging and exercise exercises
without brain jogging of athletes' and team's individual athletic concentrations. Brain jogging give significant
effect on the athletes’ concentration.
1 INTRODUCTION
The success of athletes in a competition is determined
by several variables; physical, engineering, and
psychological variables (Heinen, 2011). These
variables are identified as predictors of success in a
competition. Concentration is a part of the
psychological aspect that should get serious attention,
because athletes in the process of training and
competition are often confronted with various
disturbances both internal and external. Internal
factors cover such aspects as athletes’ own thoughts,
feelings, bodily sensations that may hamper their
efforts to concentrate on the job at hand. External
factors on the other hand involves objective
environmental events and situation that divert
athletes’ attention away from its intended target
(Brewer, 2009). Specifically, athletes who have no
concentration will have no accurate the throws,
punches, kicks, and shots. The conditions that occur
in athlete sports tennis do not punch accurately, the
ball caught on the net, ball out, and difficult athletes
put the ball in a position far from the opponent's reach
Similar problems occur in football, athletes do
shooting but the ball bounced high, but his position is
in front of goal (Komarudin, 2015). Such condition is
a problem that often occurs in sports both team sports
and individuals.
Athlete concentrations need to be trained with an
appropriate psychological practice method one of
which is a brain jogging exercise. Brain jogging
exercise is an exercise method dominated by jogging
motion using ladder media, this exercise is adopted
from the Life Kinetic training developed by Kuswari
in Indonesia. In principle this exercise is similar to
Life Kinetic is very popular in Western Europe like
Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain. This
exercise is a combination of motor activity and
cognitive challenges and the training of visual
perception, especially the perception of the visual
field peripherals. Moving limbs in different unusual
combinations, catching, and throwing objects, thus
training the visual perception and limb-eye
coordination, is a basic characteristic of the training
(Demirakca, 2016). The essence of this research is
combining different motor activities which activate
and shape associative cortical fields and, at the same
456
Komarudin, K.
Brain Jogging Exercise and Team and Individual Sports Athletes’ Concentration.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Sports Science, Health and Physical Education (ICSSHPE 2017) - Volume 1, pages 456-459
ISBN: 978-989-758-317-9
Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
time, improve the efficiency of an athlete’s thought
processes (Duda, 2015). Brain jogging is beneficial in
improving concentration because this exercise can
stimulate brain cells (Kuswari, 2014) and it is suitable
for children and elderly people for individual and
team sports players. furthermore, this method is
frequently used by professional athletes (Duda, 2015)
Silva and Arida (2015) human studies have shown
that environmental stimuli such as physical activity
habits seem to have a favorable influence on brain
development. Kita (2014) stated that physical
exercise can induce brain plasticity and regulate
mental function, enhance learning and memory.
Grünke (2014) also explains that body coordination
exercises affect the brain development of children and
adults. The exercise involves complex motion
patterns that can stimulate cells in the hippocampus
that result in improved memory. The study confirms
that physical activity including brain jogging
exercises has an effect on concentrations among
children, adults, and even professional athletes. But
the research is still general, not specifically review the
different sports that is the sport of teams and
individuals. The concentration of athletes in both
sports is essentially the same, that is, attention focuses
on the tasks that must be done without being affected
by various disturbances both internal and external.
But the difference is the type of disorder, the sports
team is more complex in addition the athlete himself,
the individual in the team, as well as the environment.
While in the sport of individuals, the disorder tends to
come from himself and his environment. The
conditions that require athletes to have the ability to
stay focused throughout his work well. The research
is, therefore, formulated as follows: does brain
jogging affect the concentration of individual and
team athletes? Is there any significant influence of
brain jogging exercises on athletes' concentrations in
team and individual sports.
2 METHOD
The method was experimental with pretest-posttest
control group design. The population is UKM UPI
athletes. The sample was active athletes participating
in team sports (basketball, football and volleyball)
and individual sports (karate, archery and badminton)
The sampling technique was non-probability
sampling by which 34 team athletes and 32 individual
athletes were obtained. The samples were divided
into two groups through random assignment
consisting of control group and experimental group.
The experimental group was given brain jogging
training for 11 meetings, twice a week the control
group was not given a brain jogging exercise but still
exercised according to the sport. The instrument was
Concentration Grid Test with 0.79 reliability level.
The analysis was performed through t test in SPSS 21
for windows.
3 RESULTS
The data for analysis is the athlete’s concentration
data both for individual and team sports. The result
was described in forms of pretest, posttest and gain
scores of concentration for either experimental or
control group. The result of the analysis was
displayed in Table 1.
Table 1: The result of pretest, posttest and gain scores of
concentration for either experimental or control group.
Variables
Test
Pretest
Posttest
Gain
Team Concentration
(Experiment)
11.353
20.647
9.294
Individual
Concentration
10.438
20.75
10.312
Team Concentration
(Control)
12.471
18.706
6.235
Individual
Concentration (Control)
11.25
18.938
7.688
Based on the calculations in Table 1, it is shown
that the gain of the test scores of the athletes' sports
team and individual at the experimental group is
greater than the control group, which means that the
brain jogging treatment can improve the athlete's
concentration.
To find out the effect of brain jogging exercise, T
test (paired t test) was carried out. The calculation is
presented as follows: From the pretest-posttest of
experimental team group, It was revealed that M= -
9.294, SD = 1.571, Std. EM = .381, t = -24.380, Sig.
= .000 < 0.05. From the pretest-posttest of
experimental individual sports, It was revealed that
M= -10.312, SD = 1.537, Std. EM = .384, t = -26.837,
Sig. = .000 < 0.05. From the pretest-posttest of control
group, It was revealed that M= -6.235, SD = 1.562,
Std. EM = .378, t = -16.454, Sig. = .000 < 0.05. From
the pretest-posttest of control group, It was revealed
that M= -7.687, SD = 1.493, Std. EM = .373, t = -
20.596, Sig. = .000 < 0.05. The result confirmed that
the athletes’ concentration on team and individual
sports in experimental group was Sig. (2-tailed) .000
< 0.05 which means that Ho was rejected. It can be
concluded that there is a significant effect of brain
Brain Jogging Exercise and Team and Individual Sports Athletes’ Concentration
457
jogging exercises and exercises without brain jogging
on the athletes' concentrations of team sports and
individuals.
Furthermore, to know the difference, which form
of exercise is better between brain jogging exercises
and exercise without brain jogging to the athletes'
concentration of team sports and individuals, it is
necessary to test the difference of two average using
independent t test. The calculation is presented as
follows: The result of concentration on sports team
was F = 0.002, Sig. = .966, t = 5.691, df = 32, Sig. (2-
tailed) = .000, MD = 3.058. While the result of
concentration on individual team was F = .019, Sig.
= .891, t = 4.900, df = 30, Sig. (2-tailed) = .000, MD
= 2.625. The result confirmed that the athletes’
concentration on team and individual sports in
experimental group was Sig. (2-tailed) .000 < 0.05
which means that Ho was rejected. It can be
concluded that there is a significant effect of brain
jogging exercises and exercises without brain jogging
on the athletes' concentrations of team sports and
individuals.
4 DISCUSSION
There is a significant influence of brain jogging
exercises on athletes' concentrations in team and
individual sports to reinforce these findings the
authors cite several opinions that, physical exercise
exercises in this case are very good brain jogging
exercises for the brain, because: First, exercise can
improve circulation so that individual nerves can get
more oxygen and nutrients. Second, exercise can
stimulate dopamine production, one of the mood-
boosting neurotransmitters (Jensen, 2008). When
brain jogging exercise is done with an adequate
amount of 40-60% then the exercise can increase the
production of new cells in the brain (Demirakca,
2016). The growth of new cells in the brain
(neurogenesis) correlates with memory (Kitabatake,
Sailor, Ming, and Song, 2007).
Neuroscientists from the University of California,
Irvine found that exercise can trigger a brain-derived
neurotrophic release (BDNF: brain derived
neurotrophic factor), a natural substance that
enhances cognition by encouraging neurons' ability to
communicate with each other Gomez and Hillman
(2013), BDNF which operates at the interface of
metabolism and synaptic plasticity, can play a crucial
role in exercise-induced cognitive enhancement.
BDNF is produced and secreted in the brain to
regulate the cellular processes of proliferation,
development and differentiation. It is synthesized by
both neurons and glial cells and allows neurons to
receive adequate nutrition to grow, develop or
regenerate themselves. Throughout development,
BDNF expression is strictly controlled, and its
alteration can cause morphological and functional
changes in the brain throughout the life course
(Bernd, 2008). The results of an Irvine study in aged
rats that daily did the exercises found BDNF
increased in various areas of the brain, including the
hippocampus that is important in memory processing.
BDNF appears to accelerate the development of long-
term potential (LTP: long-term memory processing),
or forming memory in young rats (Jensen, 2008).
Therefore, exercise in particular brain jogging
exercises greatly affects mind, mood, memory, and
overall health (Dishman, 2006).
The use of brain jogging exercises provides
broader benefits, and works very well for the brain,
especially in the formation of new synapses in the
brain (Duda, 2015). On another study it was believed
that physical activity in the treatment of improvement
in aspects of cognitive function in older adults are
becoming increasingly well established. Furthermore,
acute bouts of well managed physical exercise may
facilitate certain aspects of information processing in
adults (Thomas, 2012). The life kinetic training was
originally designed to train the coordination of
athletes the difficulty of the task can easily be adapted
to the capabilities of patient populations. Based on the
assumption that spontaneous activity reflects the
history of co-activation within a local brain network
or between brain regions, we expect increases in
resting-state connectivity of those brain regions
probably involved in the exercises and tasks
(Demirakca, 2016). In a longitudinal study, it was
explained that older adults that participate in
physical activity show less cognitive decline over
two-to 10-year follow-up periods. Cardiorespiratory
fitness assessed at baseline predicted cognitive
performance six years later in a variety of cognitive
domains (working memory, processing speed,
attention, and general mental functioning) (Bherer,
Erickson and Liu-ambrose, 2013). Furthermore, there
are significant differences in the influence of brain
jogging exercises on increasing the concentration of
team and individual sports. The authors cite opinion
(Duda, 2015) that, brain jogging exercises are
beneficial for improving the broader health of the
brain's functioning through the formation of new
synapses in the brain. The method is suited both for
children and elderly people, for individual and team
sports players (Duda, 2015).
ICSSHPE 2017 - 2nd International Conference on Sports Science, Health and Physical Education
458
5 CONCLUSIONS
Brain jogging exercises have a significant effect on
the concentration of team and individual sports
athletes, and there are significant differences in the
effects of brain jogging and exercises without brain
jogging of athletes' and team's individual athletic
concentrations. Therefore, brain jogging exercises
can be used as one method of psychological exercise
to increase the concentration of athletes in both team
and individual sports.
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