Functional fitness for dental hygiene students: Does it make them fit to sit?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Static positioning and awkward postures put dental hygienists at risk for work-related musculoskeletal disorders. These disorders often appear during professional training programs. Ergonomics education has been shown to reduce the incidence of injuries, but fitness training to improve postural awareness and endurance is not typically included in dental hygiene curricula. This study assessed the effects of a 12-week functional fitness training program on ergonomic and postural knowledge, outcome expectations and self-efficacy related to exercise, and core stability in final-year dental hygiene students. Methods: Participants (n = 24) completed surveys and core stability tests and demonstrated postural movements before and after completing a mandatory weekly training program focusing on dynamic core stabilization, aerobic exercise, and postural awareness. Results: Participants improved static plank hold time and left leg forward lunge scores, with no significant changes in right lunge or stability push-up tests. Accuracy in demonstrating postural movements in response to verbal cues improved for 2 of 6 movements. Knowledge about injury risk factors and body mechanics was relatively high at pre-test and did not change post-test. Outcome expectations and self-efficacy were not significantly different from pre- to post-test. Conclusions: Functional fitness training resulted in increased core endurance and improved execution of some movement patterns associated with good body mechanics. Our study provides evidence for the inclusion of this type of conditioning program in the dental hygiene curriculum. Further research, including more sensitive tests of physical function as well as the transfer of knowledge and safe postures into clinically relevant situations, is warranted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".