Abstract
To predict future performance, coaches rely on their previous experiences with a relatively small number of adolescent competitive swimmers to estimate the rate of improvement. The purpose of this study is to quantify the annual change in competition performance as backstroke swimmers mature. Data from 2006 to 2017 provided 9,956 swimming years of accumulated data which was used to estimate the rate of improvement of male and female backstroke swimmers as they aged from 8 to 18 years. Swimming performance improved rapidly between 8 and 13 years, and improvements diminished as swimmers approached their performance potential around 18 years old. These results provide accurate age-based progression data for adolescent backstroke swimmers, providing baseline performance prediction for coaches to predict future performance as swimmers mature, and providing a measure against which potential improvements from novel coaching and training methods can be objectively evaluated.
Highlights
A swimmer’s performance fluctuates over time and accurately tracking performance improvement is complicated given within and between competition performance changes, as well as whether a swimmer is in a peaking or a heavy training macrocycle
The mean yearly percentage improvement for each age-group was calculated by comparing each swimmer’s current year’s best time to their fastest swim from the previous year; with the exception of a swimmer’s first competitive year where their first ever swim was used as the comparison baseline
The mean performance times improved by approximately one third (34– 42%) from age 8 to 18 years, with similar percent changes in long and short course and for each gender
Summary
A swimmer’s performance fluctuates over time and accurately tracking performance improvement is complicated given within and between competition performance changes, as well as whether a swimmer is in a peaking or a heavy training macrocycle. Competition times are expected to be faster than training times. Swimmer’s times vary between competitions as demonstrated by Stewart and Hopkins (2000) who found a typical competition-to-competition variation of 1.4% (95% likely range of true value, 1.3–1.5%) for the same stroke and event in their analysis of 532 junior and national level swimmers. Faster swimmers displayed less variation (1.1%; 0.9–1.4%) than slower swimmers 1.5%; 1.3–1.9%). This parallels findings with the sport’s most elite athletes: Fulton et al (2009) calculated a between competition performance variation of ∼1% with data from 242 elite Paralympic swimmers. Pyne et al (2004) calculated a between competition performance
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