| Description |
Purpose: Medical professionals can better recognize and treat injuries caused by deviation, such as back pain when normative and baseline values are determined. Dancers are often a forgotten athletic population. Researchers have yet to determine dancers' normative back and core muscle endurance values. Study Purpose: This study aims to 1) fill a gap and collect normative and baseline values after four trunk muscle endurance tests and 2) determine if the normative values differ between dancers with a history of back pain. Hypothesis: I hypothesized that the dance population's normative values for trunk muscle endurance tests would differ from those for other athletic populations. I also hypothesized that dancers with back pain would have lower endurance times. Methods: We tested 24 university dance majoring students using McGill's Torso Muscular Endurance Test. We applied McGill's test according to standard procedures. We measured the amount of time, in seconds, dance students could hold four different positions (trunk extension, trunk flexion, and right and left side plank). We used descriptive statistics to create normative values for our dance population and compared the results to existing other athletic populations' research literature. Results: Dancers could hold the back extension position the longest (188.2 ± 64.7 s), followed by trunk flexion (124.8 ± 79.2 s), right side plank (82.9 ± 31.9 s), and left side plank (80.2 ± 20.1 s). When the data was separated into dancers with a history of lower back pain and dancers with no history, those with a history of pain had slightly lower normative averages. |
