At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon's French empire conquered much of Europe, the German patriot Friedrich Ludwig Jahn invented the first German national gymnastics program known as Turnen. The idea was to create a new German body and a new form of national discipline. Walking for bodily fitness, to instill national awareness, training on special equipment and rediscovering ancient German dance forms all became part of the new body culture. It is out of this movement with its nationalist and later racist culture that much of the modern gymnastics and dance movements in Germany gained their ideologies. This article sketches some stages of this social and physical continuity, from the resistance to the French to the establishment of the racial state in 1933 and to the provision of a Nazi aesthetic by German modern dancers.

This is the first study developed in Portugal which investigates specific characteristics of dance and gymnastics environments that make them high-risk contexts for the development of eating disorders. Four focus groups were conducted with thirteen ballet students from a professional dance school and nine gymnasts from a gymnastics club (aged 12 to 17 years old), which were subjected to an inductive-deductive analysis procedure. Specific risk and protective factors were identified. Among their respective sources of influence, teachers and coaches are those who exert a stronger influence upon young athletes. We also explored some themes related to the influence of peers, parents, and environmental characteristics, which could have an important role on the development or prevention of disordered eating.

The present study examined sensitivity to kinaesthetic information for fifty-one girls aged 9 to 10 years. Girls with competitive sporting experience were divided into a gymnastics group, ball-skills group and a combined (gymnastic and ball-skills) group. A non-athlete control group was also included. Baseline measures of general motor ability were obtained using the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (Henderson and Sugden, 1992) and measures of sensitivity to kinaesthetic information were obtained using the Kinaesthetic Acuity Test (KAT) [Livesey and Parkes, 1995]. Results revealed a moderate but significant correlation between motor proficiency and kinaesthetic acuity. A stronger finding was the ability of the Kinaesthetic Acuity Test (KAT) to predict the motor performance of girls with high and low kinaesthetic acuity within the sample. High kinaesthetic acuity predicted significantly better motor proficiency and low kinaesthetic acuity predicted significantly poorer motor proficiency. Results further indicated that kinaesthetic acuity did not differ as a function of specific sporting experience.