Age-related physical and performance changes in young swimmers: The comparison of predictive models in 50-meter swimming performance

Abstract

Introduction: The purpose of the study was to investigate the age-related anthropometric and motor performance changes over time and their contributions to swimming style-specific performance in young different chronological age swimmers. Material and Methods: The study was conducted on a total of forty swimmers who were divided into 2 groups. The Anthropometric meas-urements were executed from 12 body parts, and body composition analysis was determined by using the skinfold method. The motor performance tests were performed for the assessment of standing horizontal jump, handgrip strength, flexed-arm hang strength, sit-up, flexibility, aerobic endurance, speed, agility, and balance. Simple Linear Regression analysis was performed to build the models for each of the swimming styles. Results: All the models indicated that aerobic endur-ance was a significantly predictive variable on all swimming styles (p < 0.001). The results indicated that the anthropometric and motor performance predictors changed depending upon the age pro-gression in each swimming style (p < 0.001). Conclusions: The effect of many variables on swimming performance is seen to be more evident in the following periods based on the increase of age. Aerobic endurance is a common variable that shows effectiveness on swimming performance for both all age groups and swimming styles.