¹Department of Physical Education, An-Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine
²College of Science, Arab American University, Jenin, Palestine
³Alistiqlal University, Jericho, Palestine
⁴Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, An-Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine DOI : 10.12991/jrp.2019.146 During the last century there were significant changes in elucidating the role of functional foods on the human’s health. Recently the global interest is focusing on the natural diets due to their important role on the physical and physiological performances. The current study aimed to evaluate the synergistic effect of watermelon juice and aquatic exercises on some physical fitness and physiological variables depending on experimental and reference groups. Thirty-six students (18 males and 18 females) in the age (19-22) from the Physical Education Department at An-Najah National University volunteered to participate in the experiment. An anthropometric measurement was performed alongside with specific medical examinations to determine the effect of both aquatic and watermelon juice and aquatic exercises alone on some physical fitness and physiological variables. The results show that both, watermelon juice and aquatic exercises, revealed statistically significant differences at p value < 0.05 compared with aquatic exercises alone. In case of gender, male and female the F-values were found significant at p ˂ 0.05 for the variables (endurance, sprint 30m, sit up, total cholesterol, high density lipoproteins). Furthermore, these findings indicated that male students were better than female students in (endurance, sprint 30 m, sit up test, and total cholesterol); in contrast female students had more high-density lipoproteins than male students. The synergistic effects of watermelon juice with aqua exercises improved the performance and physiological variables for the experimental group. Keywords : Watermelon; aqua exercises; performance; physiological variables