Postural Education: Correlation Between Postural Habits and Musculoskeletal Pain in School Age Children

The best way to avoid poor postural habits, is to teach children good postural behaviors for performing their everyday life activities (Verderi in Programa de educacao postural, 2011 [1]). Despite the existence of specific programs, intended for children's self-body consciousness improvement, Physical Education curricula lack this type of exercises (Braccialli and Vilarta in Revista paulista de Educacao Fisica 14: 159-171, 2000 [2]; Costa and Freire in Estudo dos exercicios fisicos voltados para correcoes das altercoes posturais, 2004 [3]; Ramos and Rodrigues in EFDeportes.com, 2013 [4]). Attended by 220 students, with ages between 10 and 15 years old, this study applied a technique (Corlett and Bishop in Ergonomics 19: 175-182, 1976 [5]) for assessing postural discomfort, and an informal questionnaire (Carmo et al. in Metodologia da Investigacao - Guia da Auto-aprendizagem, 1998 [6]; Rebolho in da educacao postural nas mudancas de habitos em escolares da 1(a) a 4(a) series do ensino fundamental, 2005 [7]), to fully understand pain and postural discomfort felt by Portuguese school age children. Results showed: a significant direct correlation between the time, and the perceived intensity of pain felt, for chronicle and acute pain; regarding postural habits, 88.5 % of subjects presented some kind of inadequate postures, perceiving significantly higher pain. Major findings, allow us to raise the awareness for postural education programs introduction in Physical Education curricula, since they could influence children's physical health.