Physical Education Students’ Knowledge of Selected Safe and Non-Recommended Exercises Strengthening the Abdominal Muscles

Introduction. The aim of the study was to assess final-year physical education (PE) students’ knowledge of exercises strengthening the abdominal muscles which are used in the introductory part of a PE lesson. Material and methods. The research involved 467 final-year physical education students. The group examined included undergraduate (Bachelor) and postgraduate (Master) students from four universities in Poland. A knowledge test with photographs was used to conduct the study. The students completed the knowledge test with one of the authors present. If the students had any questions regarding the exercises included in the test, they were demonstrated by the person in the photographs. The data were analysed using the Mann- Whitney-Wilcoxon test. Kendall’s concordance coefficient was used to assess reliability and measure the agreement between the opinions of a group of experts who were asked to rate the exercises in terms of their safety and effectiveness. The calculations were made with the use of statistical and calculation software (SPSS 9.0 for Windows). An alpha value < 0.05 was accepted as the level of significance of differences between the groups of undergraduate and postgraduate students. Results. Eighty-two participants (17.6%) performed the task correctly, selecting all the safe exercises, 139 students (29.8%) made one error, while 110 marked all the overloading and ineffective exercises as safe. Conclusions. The students’ knowledge of safe exercises strengthening the abdominal muscles was insufficient. Both undergraduate and postgraduate students demonstrated similar knowledge concerning these exercises.