Strength and mobility of primary school children and its effect on diving points

BACKGROUND: Competitive diving requires strength, agility, balance, timing, courage, and quickness for which an accurate evaluation of training load is paramount, both for training planning and for injuries prevention. Moreover, a detailed profile of children physical fitness allows the determination of the underlying performance qualities but also of a wide range of attributes associated with health-related quality of life. METHODS: Forty children aged 5-10 were evaluated on multi-component aspects of physical fitness. Diving performance was evaluated in children attending a diving school, and their fitness level was compared with same age sedentary peers. RESULTS: Results showed that mobility is crucial to better perform in diving at recreational level. No significant differences were found between divers and control groups in the anthropometrical values, indicating that they were evenly matched and the significantly different values between the fitness variables of the groups, showed that divers had better fitness level. CONCLUSIONS: Recreational diving could be a suitable structured sport activity to improve health-related fitness in primary school children. However, diving requires specific ability that begins to be trained at an early age, therefore, training outcome should be continuously and carefully evaluated. Regarding this, the field fitness proposed to assess strength and mobility seems to be suitable for this purpose.