Dražan Dizdar

Reliability of a Photographic Method for Assessing Standing Posture of Elementary School Students

OBJECTIVE A high prevalence of poor standing posture among elementary schoolchildren indicates the need for the introduction of school-based interventions for improvement of postural alignments. For assessing the effect of intervention programs, reliable quantitative measures of standing posture should be used. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the reliability of a photographic method for assessment of standing posture among elementary schoolchildren. METHODS The study was conducted on a convenience sample of 273 male students between 10 and 13 years old. Each subject was photographed in habitual standing posture, 3 times in a front view and 3 times in a side view. Deviations from ideal postural alignment were calculated with Posture Image Analyzer software and UTHSCSA ImageTool software. Interitem reliability was estimated using intraclass correlation coefficient. RESULTS Intraclass correlation coefficients for posture deviations assessed with Posture Image Analyzer ranged from 0.81 for knee joints deviation and ankle joints deviation in the coronal plane to 0.92 for trunk deviation and knee joints deviation in the sagittal plane. Intraclass correlation coefficients for posture deviations assessed with UTHSCSA ImageTool ranged from 0.80 for knee joints deviation in the coronal plane to 0.91 for trunk deviation and knee joints deviation in the sagittal plane. CONCLUSIONS This study showed a satisfactory interitem reliability of a photographic method for the assessment of standing posture among elementary schoolchildren.

The Effect of Cigarette Smoking History on Muscular and Cardiorespiratory Endurance

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of cigarette smoking history on physical fitness in younger adults. Small, insignificant differences in BMI between non-smokers and smokers were shown regardless of cigarette smoking history duration. Although the differences in muscular endurance increased in the samples with progressing cigarette smoking history duration, a highly significant difference in aerobic endurance was observed between the group of non-smokers and smokers with a history of smoking up to 5 years and persisted at the same level in smokers with a history of smoking for longer than 10 years.

Differences in kinematic parameters of athletes of different running quality

The aim of the study was to determine the differences among subjects of different sprinting quality in the variables of running dynamics in the 100 m sprint event and in the variables of kinematic indicators (stride frequency, stride length, foot-ground contact duration, airborne phase duration). The research was conducted on a sample of 133 physical education teacher male students, aged 19 to 24 years (age 21.7 ± 1.08 yrs ; body height 180.8 ± 6.98 cm ; body mass 76.6 ± 7.62 kg), first year students at the Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Zagreb, who regularly attended their athletics classes. Basic descriptive statistical parameters were computed. Cluster analysis was used to determine sprinting-quality-based homogeneous groups of subjects. The qualitative differences among the subjects pertaining to the defined groups were established by canonical discriminant analysis. One significant discriminant function was obtained differentiating the group of students who performed well from all the other groups of students with poorer sprint performance. The best performance group demonstrated running technique characterised by the shortest foot-ground contact time in the phases of starting acceleration and maximum speed running, and a larger stride length in the phase of maximum speed running.