Scoliosis deformity and childs’ fitness

In a society, healthy living depends on many components of three inter oven dimensions- Physical dimension, Mental dimension and Social dimension. Among them good posture and fitness are complementary to each other. So, if the posture is deviated from its normal condition then it may affect the fitness. So, the purpose of the present study was to find out the effect of scoliosis on Childs’ speed and agility ability. For conducting this study total 363 school going children [Boys Normal Posture- 182, Girls Normal Posture- 168, Boys having scoliosis deformity – 6 and Girls having scoliosis deformity- 7] of 10 to 13 years old were purposively selected, from rural area of Howrah District, West Bengal, India. Criteria measured for this study were age, height and weight as personnel data; scoliosis deformity, as postural deformity; speed and agility as fitness variables. To detect the scoliosis deformity plumb line test method was used. Speed and agility were measured by standard test 50 yard das and 4*10 meter shuttle run respectively. The data were analyzed using the Prism 3.0 version and the level of significance was chosen at 0.05 level. Mean and standard deviation (SD) were used as descriptive statistics. ANOVA and t-test were used to observe the significant differences between selected postural groups on selected fitness components. Result of the present study revealed that there were significant differences between the boys having normal posture and the boys having scoliosis deformity, and between the girls having normal posture and the girls having scoliosis deformity were the better performer than the students of general education. So, it can be concluded that incidence of postural deformity has negative influence on selected physical fitness components - speed and agility, indirectly on healthy living and partially on the creation of healthy nation.