I was reading a book last night, Don’t Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, that made mention of an African qualifier -- you are still a child until you can reach one arm straight up to the sky, bend it over your head and cover the opposite ear with your hand.
I tried it immediately.
Glad to see that there is finally some measure of maturity. Besides confirming my suspicions that I am now, to my chagrin, an adult, I found it interesting, because I love all things anthropometric. Except how to spell anthropometric. I misspell it every time. Even the second time that I just typed it right now.
Don’t judge me.
Anthropometric dimensions are what anthropometrists study in the field of anthropometry. Wait. You should or should not use the word in the definition? I can never remember that one. Let’s try that again.
anthropo=human
metric=measures
ists=ones who ...
etry=the study of
You can do the math from here.
Biomechanists love anthropometrists. Really, they do. I would have married one too, if there were more than 14 of them on the planet and they were under the age of 64. But as things go, I have to love them from afar.
When it comes to the skeleton, there are average human measures, i.e. the numbers you’d get if you surveyed the world population, but there are also trends in measures that come up when you compare men to women. If you look at the measures of a population from a specific geographical region, you get some trends in measures there as well. There are trends within races of people, and there are trends within populations of people who can perform specific sports or athletic events, meaning, no matter how much you want to achieve elite status at a particular sport, say gymnastics for example, the chances of you succeeding would depend just as much on the ratio of your bony lengths as it would how hard you practiced.
Who cares about anthropometric dimensions, you ask? As someone who studies the effects of movement, exercise and exercise modalities, I do. And as a participant in various exercise modalities, you should too. There are a ton of culturally-based movement practices out there. These are series of exercises that have been developed over time for or by a particular group of people -- whether it be a particular race or a particular group of people all participating in the same sport -- who all have (on average) the same segment lengths, the same height, and muscle mass, the same joint mobility because they have a lifetime of the same movement practices.
And then these practices get handed to Bob, along with the phrase, "these movements have worked for many for many years." And Bob follows the exercise prescription because the movements have been deemed good. And, these movements might have been good for the population at the time. But they might not be right for Bob because Bob might have an entirely different lever system that makes these beneficial movements more detrimental over time.
The exercise itself is not flawed or bad or creepy or whatever. It simply causes more torque or too high or too little a load. It's simply not the correct ExRx.
Which is why I like to work with angles and mass and utilize research that is not culturally biased. I like movement prescription based on geometry and physical law and muscle actions that all humans need to sustain themselves biologically. P.S. This is not one of those biologically-necessary motions:
Have you already tried reaching your hand over your head yet? Hopefully you scored “adult” easily. But could you help me out a bit? I’m trying to figure out the average age a kid would achieve this task. Note: They shouldn’t elevate the shoulder like this
or bend the head to one side. And make sure that they’re directly over the top of the skull.
Then, type below something like: Age 4, no. Age 6, no. Age 14, yes.
There is absolutely no reason to do this other than I find it interesting, both biomechanically and culturally and because it’s fun to get your kids to do things like put their arms over their head to touch their ears.
It kind of looks like I'm Vogue-ing here, ya?
Anthropometric lesson off. {clap clap}