Investigation of Freestyle Performance in Swimmers with Different Equipments

Abstract

The present study sought to examine the freestyle proficiency of juvenile swimmers deploying various accessories, namely fins, kickboard, and pull-buoy. Twenty-three participants, comprising 14 females and 9 males aged between 10 and 11 years, who reside in Istanbul, pursue activities in exclusive clubs, have held an athlete license for no less than three years, and expressed a keen interest in swimming opted to take part in the study. The research was implemented voluntarily in a private club's indoor swimming pool (25 m short lane). First, the swimmers' body weight, height, and arm length were measured. They then demonstrated their freestyle performance at distances of 25 m, 50 m, 75 m, and 100 m using different equipment: maximal, fins, pull-buoy, and kickboard-only flutter kick. Swimming performances with each piece of equipment were performed two days apart, and all swimmers' performances were recorded with an SJCAM 4k external camera. After conducting the test, the captured images were transferred to the computer and processed using the Kinovea 0.9.5 program in MP4 format. Individual calculations were made for each swimmer's finish time, lap times and velocity for each distance and equipment. The data were evaluated using the IBM SPSS 24.0 analysis program. It was ensured that the data followed a normal distribution ("±1.5"). The comparison of finish times, lap times and velocity of swimmers using different equipment was analysed using repeated measures variance. There was a statistical difference between the fins, kickboard and pull-buoy in finish time, lap times and velocity (p