It is very common in artistic gymnastics that gymnast have palm injuries, because they are often exposed to long lasting loads. In order to investigate this issue we, as part of a broader study entitled Short-term effects of palm load on the palm temperature in hang and support, performed a series of measurements related to palm temperature before and after hang and support. In order to understand what happens before and after load, we were first interested in how body characteristics and skin thickness affect the average and maximum palm skin temperature, which is also the basic purpose of this research. Moreover, we were interested in finding out if symmetry in body characteristics influences the symmetry in palm temperature. We collected the data for this study at Faculty of Sport on 38 healthy students of the same faculty. Firstly, we scanned palms of the students, measured palm circumference with and without thumb and with a help of thermal camera, we took a photo of the right and the left palm at rest. Secondly, in a physiology laboratory, we collected data of the body composition with the InBody 720, the anthropometric characteristics were collected with 3D body scanner and we measured skin thickness with high frequency ultrasound as well. After the statistical analyses of data in SPSS, we analysed and explained the results. We found out that there is a statistically significant correlation between temperature (mean and maximum) and fourteen body characteristics (body height, skeletal muscle mass, body fat mass, arm lean mass, thumb length, index finger length, middle finger length, ring finger length, little finger length, palm width, palm length, left wrist circumference, palm circumference with and without thumb). We did not find a statistically significant correlation between skin thickness and palm temperature (mean and maximum). Additionally, the results showed that symmetry in body characteristics does not affect symmetry in palm temperature.
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