Abstract

Introduction: Obesity and overweight as healthy problems threaten the health of people in any society. Many research findings have proved that physical activity including aerobic and anaerobic training can play an important role in controlling body weight and fat percentage through leptin hormone which regulate metabolism of lipids. Research evidences show that physical activities may decrease serum leptin levels of healthy people. Increasement of leptin responses leads to the fact that more fats are used to produce energy which finally causes reduction on body weight and fat percentage. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of eight weeks aerobic and combined aerobic and anaerobic training on serum leptin levels, fat percentage, body mass index and body weight of healthy petrochemical office workers aged 30-45. Methods: The method of this applied study was Semi- experimental accompanied with pre-test, post-test using three groups. For this purpose among 2700 officers 120 healthy office workers voluntarily took part in this study. 45 subjects were randomly selected and randomly and equally divided into three groups of 1)Aerobic group , 2) Combined aerobic and anaerobic group and 3) Control group. Before and after 8 weeks training, height, weight, fat percentage and serum, leptin levels (2.5 ml venous blood) were measured. The subjects participated in aerobic training at 60% HR max and combined aerobic and anaerobic training at 80- 90% HR max for eight weeks, three days a week and 60 minutes a day. One- way ANOVA and Tukey follow - up test at significant level of P < 0.05 were used to analyze the collected data. Results and Conclusions: Results showed that significant decrease was observed between aerobic and combined group in leptin (P < 0.001) comparing with control group .Also significant difference between aerobic and combined group comparing to control group considering fat percentage, (P < 0.001).BMI (P < 0.001) and body weight (P < 0.001) were seen. So that, these three variables decrease after 8 weeks of training, but the effect of aerobic training was more significant comparing with combined training. However, general results indicate that performing regular aerobic exercises is a better training method to affect serum leptin responses in order to regulate and increase fat metabolism and reduce the fat percentage, BMI and body weight.