ABSTRACT
In comparison to adults and adolescents, relatively little is known about the responses of prepubescent children to submaximal exercise and the data are often difficult to interpret due to the confounding influence of body mass[1, 2]. Most studies of children’s exercise responses have “controlled for body mass” using the conventional ratio standard (exercise response ÷ body mass), but there is a growing conviction that per body mass ratios do not necessarily render performance measures independent of body mass[1]. The use of allometric models (y = a·xb)to derive size-independent exercise performance measures has been demonstrated to be theoretically and statistically superior to the simple ratio standard in analysing size-related function[3, 4].
