Abstract

Physical fitness and navigation skills are the keys for seafarers during maritime work and need to receive consideration for maritime students. This paper introduces a new training method that is functional training, into the physical education curriculum of maritime colleges. The functional training is expected to influence indirectly the physical fitness and navigation skills through its effects on maritime students. The research methods include literature, experiment and mathematical statistics. In the experiment, 66 maritime students in a maritime college in China have been chosen and divided into experimental group and reference group. During the 16-week experiment, the experimental group has been adopted functional training, while the reference group remains unchanged. The basic physical fitness, navigation skills and functional movement screen (FMS) scores of the experimental group before and after experiment have been evaluated, and then analyzed using SPSS27.0 software. There is no significant difference between the experimental group and the reference group in 50 m running, 1000 m running and solid ball throwing (P>0.05), but the experimental group has a greater improvement in performance. While, there are significant differences in rope throwing, 500 m swimming and FMS scores (P<0.05). The results show that the functional training has a good effect on improving the physical fitness and navigation skill level of maritime students, and would be potential in the physical fitness assessment and training planning of maritime students.