| This study was designed to examine the effects of an 8-week Partner's Improvisational Resistance Training class, that met 3 times weekly, on changes in muscular strength, muscular flexibility, body circumferences, and body fat percentage in college age dancers. Intrarater reliability was tested on all tests with a group of 15 volunteers (13 females and 2 males). Twenty-one dancers from Weber State University in Ogden, Utah completed all pretests and posttests; control group n = 10 and experimental group n = 11. The battery of tests included 1RMs for muscular strength (leg extension, leg flexion, leg press, bench press, military press, lat pull down, sit up, and back extension), underwater weighing, a 7-Site skinfold, Sit & Reach and Shoulder Flexibility, and circumferences for arm, shoulder, waist, hip, proximal thigh, mid-thigh, and distal thigh. A statistical correlation was performed for the strength tests and also for the body circumferences. Significant correlation was found between the military press and bench press, thus the military press was not included in further statistical analysis. No significant correlations were found between any of the circumference measures. Statistical significance was set at p ≤ .05 for all analyses. Significant difference was found between the two groups for muscular strength using a MANOVA; leg extension, leg press, and bench press were the tests found to have significant difference among the univariate analyses with increases of 20.2%, 37.7%, and 24.7% respectively. No significant difference between the two groups was found for flexibility or body circumference measures using MANOVAs. No significant difference was found between the two groups for Sit Up, total body weight, body fat percentage, fat weight, or lean weight using ANOVAs. It appears that an 8-week partnering class can improve muscular strength without impacting muscular flexibility and body composition. |
