A profile of the musculoskeletal characteristics and flexibility of a group of young professional dancers in Hong Kong

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the musculoskeletal characteristics and flexibility of a group of young professional dancers in Hong Kong. Twenty eight young professional female (mean age 21.3¡Ó2.6) and eleven professional male (mean age 23.0¡Ó1.5) dancers participated in this study. Items for investigation included an injury profile, maximum strength of extensor and flexor muscles of each knee, the “sit and reach” flexibility, the behind the back reach test of shoulder flexibility, and the shoulder abduction flexibility. In this study, the three most frequent injuries among these dancers were chondromalcia patellae (29.4%), ligament sprain of the back (26.4%), and sprained ankle (15.8%). The other conditions (30.2%) included sprained neck ligament, shoulder impingement syndrome, hamstring pull, chronic compartment syndrome of the calf, shin splint, and trigger hallux. The highest muscle strength (186.14 Newton-meter¡Ó28.2) was obtained from the dominant quadriceps of the male dancers performed at 60°/sec. The hamstrings and quadriceps strength ratios were within the limits of 47.5% to 50.5%. as for the flexibility, these dancers had good lower limb flexibility with mean “sit and reach” test values of 44.7 cm for the males and 46.9 cm for the females respectively. Female dancers had better shoulder abduction flexibility (86.1 cm¡Ó28.8) than male dancers (89.5 cm¡Ó25.0). The same applied to the behind the back reach flexibility. The results showed that the female dancers were significantly more flexible than male dancers in all the flexibility tests including the “sit and reach” flexibility test, the shoulder abduction flexibility, and the two hand behind the back tests (p<0.05). the results of this study may be able to serve as a reference for a scale data base collection of large more dancers in future. Copyright © 1996 The Hong Kong Association of Sports Medicine and Sports Scinece.