Revista Brasileira de Medicina do Esporte
Print version ISSN 1517-8692
CATENASSI, Fabrizio Zandonadi et al. Relationship between body mass index and gross motor skill in four to six year-old children. Rev Bras Med Esporte [online]. 2007, vol.13, n.4, pp. 227-230. ISSN 1517-8692. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1517-86922007000400003.
This study had to aim to verify the relationship between performance in gross motor skill tasks and body mass index (BMI) in four to six year-old boys and girls. 27 children were analyzed, 16 boys and 11 girls, mean age of 5.64 ± 0.67 years. The children were submitted to the Test of Gross Motor Development-Second Edition (TGMD-2), proposed by Ulrich (2000) and to the Körperkoordinations-test für Kinder (KTK), proposed by Kiphard and Schilling (1974). The punctuation obtained in the two tests was reduced to a scale common to both. The correlation between this scale and the BMI of the children was verified through the Spearman correlation test, with P < 0.05. No significant interaction was observed among variables when boys and girls were analyzed or when the analysis was conducted with gender distinction. Moreover, no interaction between the BMI and tasks which required higher demand of physical capacities was observed, which should be verified in further studies. It was possible to conclude from our results, that the performance of four to six year-old children in tasks which involved gross motor skill did not relate with BMI.
Keywords : Motor development; Motor assessment; Body mass index.