Abstract

An important consideration in pediatric exercise sciences is how researchers can identify the effects of risk factors (e.g., physical inactivity, dietary composition, social class, and ethnic origin) on health-related fitness variables (e.g., peak VO2, lung function, grip strength, leg power, and arterial blood pressure) in the presence of confounding effects (e.g., differences in age, body size, and maturation). Allometric scaling provides an elegant method of identifying such risk factors while adjusting for the confounding effects of body size, age, and maturation while at the same time overcoming the undesirable distributional characteristics of such data (i.e., skewness (nonnormal) with heteroscedastic error variances). In contrast, the simple ratio standard (e.g., peak oxygen uptake (ml/kg/min), and peak and mean power (W/kg)), although not a truly scaled ratio or index, is still able to provide the best prediction of weight-bearing athletic (e.g., running) performance. Verf.-Referat