And here’s the bit on participants.
2. Method
2.1. Participants
Twenty-four healthy older women (range 65–78, M = 71.42, SD = 4.02 years) were recruited from the community (a small town in rural Spain) and gave informed consent to participate. They reported that they did not perform any regular physical activity. The inclusion criteria were age (over 65 years) and sex (women only). The exclusion criteria were engagement in physical or cognitive training in the last three years and presence of mental or physical medical conditions that interfered with performing the cognitive and exercise tasks. We encouraged participants to maintain their diet but avoid alcohol ingestion. The protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee at the University of Extremadura in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Power calculations focused on the group by test interaction effects associated with our 3 group by 4 test experimental design and analysis. Specifically, GPower (Faul et al., 2007) indicated that with a sample size of 24, our study was powered at 80 % to detect significant (p < .05) between-within (i.e., group by test) interaction effects (f = .28, ηp2 = .07) corresponding to a small-to-medium effect size by analysis of variance (Cohen, 1992). Previous studies have documented the performance benefits of BET compared to standard physical training with similar sample sizes: 20 (Barzegarpoor et al., 2021), 22 (Staiano et al., 2022), 24 (Dallaway et al., 2023), and 24–26 (Staiano et al., 2023), and young adult athletes. Accordingly, the current sample size was deemed adequate to explore the effects of BET on performance.
