Evaluation of relations between body posture parameters with somatic features and motor abilities of boys aged 14 years.

INTRODUCTION Body posture is an individual characteristic for everyone, it shows great differentiation - especially in people during their progressive development. As a result, the variability of the development and lack of physical activity impose body posture defects in children and youth. In the literature there is a great lack of measureable data on the relations between correct body posture with somatic features, especially motor features in children at the developing age. The aim of this study was to evaluate the relations between correct body posture parameters, measured with the photogrammetric method, with some of the somatic features and motor abilities of boys at the age of 14. MATERIAL AND METHODS The study included 133 boys aged 14 attending junior secondary schools in the Kraków area of Poland. Only boys with the correct body posture were examined. Posture was examined by the Moire method, through which six parameters were obtained in the sagittal plane, seven in the frontal plane, and one in the transverse plane. The somatic measurements included basic parameters, such as body weight and body height. The measurements of motor features included: marching balance test, speed movement test of the arms and their functional strength. To evaluate the relationships between correct body posture with the characteristics of somatic and motor abilities, the Spearman rank correlation was used. The lowest level of statistical significance was accepted at p≤0,05. RESULTS No correlations were noted between some of the correct body posture features and the somatic features, and some of the motor abilities of the examined boys at the level of p≤0.05 and p≤0.01. CONCLUSIONS The irregular correlation between the correct body posture and somatic and motor features probably results from the rather big development variability of the boys during puberty.