Teaching best practices for tricipital fold assessment in physical education students

Urra Albornoz C.; Vidal Espinoza R.; Rivera Portugal M.; Valdes Retamal S.; Gomez Campos R.; Cossio Bolaños M. · Nutricion Clinica y Dietetica Hospitalaria (2025) · DOI: 10.12873/453urra

Resumen

Introduction: The skinfold method is widely used in health and exercise sciences, so it requires practical experience for its measurement. Objective: To develop a teaching program to measure the tricipital skinfold assessment process in physical education students. Methods: A pre-experimental study was designed, a group of university students underwent a teaching program to evaluate the tricipital skinfold for 2 sessions of 120 minutes each during 2 weeks. The perception scale was applied to knowledge of body composition (BC) assessment, anthropometric assessment and ultrasound of the tricipital fold. Descriptive statistics were used, comparisons were by means of t-test for similar samples. To observe the concordance between both methods, the Bland-Altman plot was used. The significance level adopted was 0.05. Results: there were significant differences (p<0.05) in the scale used, after the application of the teaching of the tricipital fold measurement process (p<0.05). The average values by anthropometry (tricipital fold) was 17.01±6.01 mm and by the criterion method (Bodymetrix) was 16.46±5.60 mm. No significant differences were observed between the two methods. Adequate agreement was observed between both methods and the limits of agreement were -1.04 to 2.14 mm. Conclusion: The practical class of short duration can be effective to develop competences in the evaluation of the tricipital fold and to improve the self-perception of the evaluative processes in physical education students.

Instituciones: Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa