Assessment of Nutritional Status by Anthropometric Indices of Indian Elite Male Soccer Players

The present study deals with the estimation of nutritional status by four anthropometric indices in purposely selected 60 Indian elite male soccer players (further divided as per their playing positions) aged 20–30 years (mean age 24.33 years ± 2.56) collected from Punjab Armed Police, Jalandhar, Punjab, India. A total of 60 controls were also collected from the same place for comparison. As many as eleven anthropometric traits, viz. height, weight, BMI, percent body fat, percent lean body mass, relative body weight, circumference of the upper arm during an isometric contraction and relaxed position of biceps brachii, circumference of thorax, circumference of abdomen and shoulder width were measured on all the subjects by standard techniques in pre-season. Four anthropometric indices, viz. Quetelet’s index (QI), Oliver’s typologic index (OTI), Lorenz’s constitutional index (LCI) and muscle index (MI) were derived from those anthropometric traits. One way ANOVA was tested followed by post hoc Bonferroni test and Pearson’s correlation coefficients were applied to analyze the data.In findings, the one way ANOVA showed statistically significant differences (p< .001) in all the variables studied, except LCI among these five sets of data. In all the anthropometric indices,soccer players with all the positions had significant differences (p< .001) with controls. It was also found that the nutritional status estimated by QI and OTI were closely associated with theIndian elite male soccer players, but not by MI and LCI. From the findings of the present study, it may be concluded that anthropometric indices would also be successfully used for the assessment of nutritional status of the soccer players