The relationship of gross upper and lower limb motor competence to measures of health and fitness in adolescents aged 13-14years

Abstract

Introduction Motor competence (MC) is an important factor in the development of health and fitness in adolescence.Aims This cross-sectional study aims to explore the distribution of MC across school students aged 13-14 years old and the extent of the relationship of MC to measures of health and fitness across genders.Methods A total of 718 participants were tested from three different schools in the UK, 311 girls and 407 boys (aged 13-14 years), pairwise deletion for correlation variables reduced this to 555 (245 girls, 310 boys). Assessments consisted of body mass index, aerobic capacity, anaerobic power, and upper limb and lower limb MC. The distribution of MC and the strength of the relationships between MC and health/fitness measures were explored.results Girls performed lower for MC and health/ fitness measures compared with boys. Both measures of MC showed a normal distribution and a significant linear relationship of MC to all health and fitness measures for boys, girls and combined genders. A stronger relationship was reported for upper limb MC and aerobic capacity when compared with lower limb MC and aerobic capacity in boys (t=−2.21, degrees of freedom=307, P=0.03, 95% CI −0.253 to -0.011).Conclusion Normally distributed measures of upper and lower limb MC are linearly related to health and fitness measures in adolescents in a UK sample.

Motor Competence in Adolescents: Exploring Association with Physical Fitness

“…Thus, some physical activities could increase PF but not improve motor development [57]. On the contrary, other studies report moderate to strong significant correlations between MC and PF in children and adolescents [58,59]. The findings also reveal that the correlations among total score of PF and placing bricks, building bricks and heel-to toe walking in the TMC varied from r = 0.019 to r = −0.133, while the correlation to walking/running on slopes was r = −0.664.…”

“…Our findings in the study indicated the challenges with motor competence tests, when MC tasks include elements of strength and speed, components that are also included in PF measures. Different test items that could be difficult to distinguish from each other regarding what aspects of movement actually are being measured are not uncommon in studies [58,59,60]. This could cause co-dependency of the empirical data [61,62] For example, the task broad jump is a PF test measuring strength (anaerobic power), while the task single leg stationary hopping is operationalized as a measure of lower body gross MC [59].…”