Growth in childhood and adolescence

Abstract

The human growth pattern with different developmental stages is a result of evolutionary trade‐offs showing specific features. The prolonged childhood and adolescence with their typical growth spurts is associated with age‐ and sex‐specific development of maturation signs, and changes of body proportions and dimensions. Biological age can be estimated with different methods and helps to classify human growth‐specific biological age stages. These stages include typical body markers, but also sociocultural and cognitive signs. Age‐specific growth velocity patterns and changes in proportions and dimensions are genetically fixed. Humans exhibit phenotypic plasticity that can result in secular trends. Conventionally, increases of body height and earlier maturation are explained by better nutrition and living conditions. However, strategic growth adjustments are being considered as possible explanations for the secular increase in height. In addition, reductions in some skeletal proportions in contemporary populations are assumed to be the result of reduced physical activity.

The Effectiveness of Biological Maturation and Lean Mass in Relation to Muscle Strength Performance in Elite Young Athletes

“…However, the results of this research also showed that the ES of maturation with the performance of muscle strength in rowers was of a lower magnitude than the ES found in other sports (see Table 5). Our results differ from previous studies, which found relationships between lean mass and advanced maturation regardless of the analyzed sport [19][20][21][22]40,41].…”

Can the Neuromuscular Performance of Young Athletes Be Influenced by Hormone Levels and Different Stages of Puberty?

“…It should be noted that the present study also demonstrated that chronological age is not a safe marker of biological age, when observing that the sample used was in the age group between 10 and 12 years old (age: 11.3 ± 0.96) and the maturation stage typical for this age group is the prepubertal [10,22,41]. However, it is known that environmental factors such as nutrition, quality of sleep, physical and cognitive stimuli interact with the puberty process.…”

“…Our group has already demonstrated that through linear regression analyses and artificial neural networks, the biological maturation markers of female subjects show about a 50% probability of predicting the neuromotor performance of upper and lower limbs [14], while hormonal markers discriminated a potential 95% chance of predicting upper limb neuromotor performance [14]. The approach highlights that although environmental factors may significantly interfere with hormonal levels (i.e., food, sleep quality, stress levels), there is a significant association between the stages of puberty and hormonal levels in children and teenagers [41][42][43].…”

“…However, it is known that environmental factors such as nutrition, quality of sleep, physical and cognitive stimuli interact with the puberty process. Therefore, the stimuli provided can interact with the biological rhythm which can cause the delay or the advancement of puberty in children and adolescents of both sexes [1,10,22,41].…”

Equation for analyzing the peak power in aquatic environment: An alternative for olympic rowing athletes

“…Anthropometric variables (i.e., height, limb length, etc.) cannot be modulated by sports training [2,[5][6][7][8][9]. However, these variables influence the "biomechanical levers" of the human body during the production of muscle strength [2,[5][6][7][8][9].…”