Participants
One hundred and twenty female members of a fitness club in Oberhausen (Germany)
who trained for at least 3 h per week were recruited for the study.
As we applied a cross-over design in order to control for sequence effects, these females were randomly
assigned to two experimental groups by throwing a die. In the first group (n¼66),
physical exercise (PE) was followed by reading a newspaper (RN), while in the second
group (n¼54), the sequence was the reverse. Of these 120 females, 14 dropped out
prior to the commencement of the experiment due to scheduling problems, a further
6 participants refused to have their photos taken in the standardised catsuit, 12
began the experiment but did not complete the study, 3 had to be excluded from the
analyses because their questionnaires contained missing data, and a further 20
participants only finished the first activity (PE or RN). Thus, N¼65 females
participated in the whole experiment and were included in the statistical analyses. Of
these females, n¼47 were in the first (PE followed by RN) and n¼18 in the second
group (RN followed by PE).