Sitting and rising from the floor belong to child and adult motor repertoire, demanding muscle strength and power, lower limb flexibility, and motor coordination, and are probably influenced by body dimensions. Araújo (1999) suggested a simple procedure, denominated Sitting-Rising Test (SRT), to evaluate the ability in these actions. In this study, the authors verified the influence of excess body weight on SRT performance. All 461 adults (288 male /173 female) submitted to medical examination between September 1998 and June 2000 and that performed SRT were retrospectively analyzed. In SRT, scores range from 0 to 5, separately for sitting and rising. One point is subtracted for each support used in the action (e.g. hand or knee) and half point is lost for any perceived unbalance. The weight/height ratio was evaluated by three different methods: body mass index (BMI) weight (kg)/height² (m) -, reciprocal of ponderal index (RPI) -height (cm)/weight1/3 (kg), and ectomorphy. There was an inverse relationship between SRT performance and excess of body weight as related to height in all methods for both sexes (p160;< 0.01). Using similar cut-off points for both sexes, the authors observed that women with BMI > 25 kg/m² or ectomorphy < 1,45 or RPI < 41 cm/kg1/3 had worse performances in the SRT as compared with others that were located in the other side of measurement scales (p < 0.05), which was not so clearly observed in male subjects. This may be due to endomorphy and mesomorphy component differences in the two sexes, since excess body weight in men is sometimes caused primarily by muscle mass, while in the female subjects it typically occurs due to excessive fat mass. The authors conclude that excess body weight impairs sitting and rising actions in adults, especially in women, and this is probably due to different patterns of body composition that are not identified by the three methods of weight/height ratio studied. In addition, the authors were able to indirectly validate the RPI and ectomorphy normality cut-off points in relation to BMI, since they presented similar SRT results.
Body mass index; Reciprocal of the ponderal index; Ectomorphy; Weight/height ratio; Sitting-Rising Test; Functional Evaluation; Obesity; Autonomy
