Association Between Body Composition And Physical Skills In Early Adolescent Athletes

Abstract

PURPOSE: This study aimed at appraising the strength of association of body composition components with a set of physical skills in early adolescent athletes. METHODS: A sample of 505 subjects (283 boys and 222 girls) was studied (Age = 13.6 ± 0.8 years, BMI = 20.1 ± 2.4 kg·m−2; mean ± SD). Anthropometric assessments were carried out, and the four-compartment model of De Rose and Guimaraes (1980) was applied to estimate body fat, muscle and bone mass percentages (%FM, %MM and %BM). The model was updated using the simple regression equations for male and female athletes proposed by Withers et al. (1987; cited by Norton, 1996) to calculate body density, and Siri equation (1961) was then applied to compute the percentage of fat mass. The three body composition components were correlated with the following physical skill tests: Handgrip strength (HAST), Abalakov jump (ABJ), 10 m Sprint test (10ST), Sit and reach flexibility (SARF) and Simple eye-hand reaction time (SEHRT). Pearson's r was used to test correlations within each gender stratum. Statistical significance was fixed at the 0.05 level. RESULTS: HAST showed negligible to low correlations with %FM, %MM and %BM (|r| < 0.3); statistical significance was found in all cases except in the correlations with %FM and %MM observed in girls. On the other hand, the correlations of ABJ with %FM and %MM reached moderate magnitudes in the male stratum (r = −0.51 and r = 0.51, respectively); ABJ evidenced significant associations with the three body composition components in both genders. Despite the opposite signs of the coefficients, 10ST presented similar degrees of association to the ones of ABJ. And SARF and SEHRT also showed negligible to low correlations with the three body composition components (|r| < 0.3), being statistically significant the ones of SARF with %FM and %MM found in boys, the one of SARF with %MM found in girls, and the one of SEHRT with %MM found in boys. CONCLUSIONS: The athletes, especially the male ones, with lower %FM and higher %MM tended, though not strongly, to have higher performances in the physical skill tests where the power is decisive. In general, %BM showed weak degrees of association with the physical skills.