Abstract:

Musculoskeletal health according to WHO (2022) refers to the fitness of the locomotor system, which has an unimpaired skeletal system, functional muscles, joints and adjacent connective tissues. The aim of the study was to identify the most common functional muscle disorders among university students majoring in physical education, depending on their chosen sports specialization. We conducted a purposive selection, where the criterion was to actively engage in recreational/performance/elite sports for 5 years, at least 3 times a week. The sample consisted of 40 participants, 19 male students and 21 female students from the 1st year of the Faculty of Sports at the University of Prešov. The average decimal age was 20.3 ± 0.5 years, body weight 78.6 ± 0.3 kg, and height 178.7 ± 0.3 cm. Our research sample consisted of participants favoring sports such as football, fitness, volleyball, athletics, karate, gymnastics, swimming, badminton, and sports shooting. For diagnosis, we selected the Healthy Back Test by Corbin, Lindsey (1994), consisting of a set of seven individual tests. The results clearly show a muscle imbalance among all of our study participants. The input measurements of the individual sports have shown that muscular imbalances are most frequently present in the sports following this order: the worst off were the students playing badminton, followed by fitness, volleyball, football, athletics, sports shooting, karate, gymnastics, and swimming as the last one, where participants had the best results in the individual tests. The expected benefit of the research is to familiarize individuals not only with their functional state of the body but also with the acquisition of such lifelong professional competences of university students that will positively influence their health-related behavior in the intentions of maintaining musculoskeletal health. With the support of the projects VEGA 1/0382/24, Prevalence and diversification of musculoskeletal disorders in university students in relation to their health-related behaviors.

Keywords:

Spine posture status, physiotherapy students, body posture, postural disorders.