Kinanthropometry of muscular volumes of elite sportsmen from olympic fighting sports

Abstract

The fighting sportsmen from boxing (box), judo (jud), freestyle wrestling (frew), Graeco-Roman wrestling (grow) and taekwondo (twd) show specific biomechanical models of body which favor the success in the combat and determine the total amounts and spatial distribution of body masses of each weight category. The objective of this paper is to analyze the values and distributions of muscular mass’s volumetric indexes of elite athletes from fighting sports. The anthropometrical data arose from an anthropometric research of Cuban athletes from box (n = 60), jud (n = 60), frew (n = 51), grow (n = 48) and twd (n = 28). The calculation of bc indexes was done using the geometrical model of total and muscle areas (tma) of the segments of extremities and the corrected muscular circumference of thorax equation proposed by Ross and Kerr (1991). The frew and grow expressed similarities for all volumetric indexes. The tma and the corrected muscular circumference of thorax results appointed the lesser volumes of extremities and thorax, respectively, for box and twd than the ones of the others. The sense of the kinanthropometric indexes joint up the sports in two groups: the twd-box one and the jud-frew-grow one. The data partially verified the hypothesis due to that was not possible to note the differences of muscular volume of the torso and extremities for each specialty.