the effect of aerobic exercise and caffeine supplementation on the cognitive performance and balance of college student-athletes recovered from covid-19

Background: the sars-cov-2 virus is viewed as one of the defining crises of the current era, with various adverse ramifications for sports performance.aim: the objective of the present study was to investigate the effect of aerobic exercise and caffeine supplementation on the cognitive performance and balance of college student-athletes recovered from covid-19.materials and methods: forty male student-athletes aged between 18 to 25 years from the imam khomeini international university of qazvin were randomly assigned to four groups: 1. exercise + caffeine supplementation, 2. aerobic exercise + placebo, 3. aerobic exercise, and 4. control, in a pre-test post-test design. the shapiro-wilk test was used to check the normality of data distribution and covariance analysis was used for inter-group comparison.results: the ancova analysis showed significant differences in cognitive performance and balance among the four groups (p<0.05). pairwise comparisons using the bonferroni post-hoc test showed statistically significant differences in cognitive performance and balance between the aerobic exercise + caffeine group versus the aerobic exercise + placebo group (p<0.05) and the aerobic exercise versus the control group (p<0.05). also, there was significant differences in mean cognitive performance and balance indices between ae+caf versus cont (p<0.005) and ae+caf versus ae (p<0.005).conclusion: the results of this study show that aerobic exercise with caffeine supplementation can improve cognitive performance and balance of student-athletes recovered from covid-19.