Modelling the Progression of Male Swimmers' Performances through Adolescence.

Shilo Dormehl,Samuel Robertson,Craig Williams

doi:10.3390/sports4010002

Shilo Dormehl, Samuel Robertson + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/sports4010002

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Abstract

Insufficient data on adolescent athletes is contributing to the challenges facing youth athletic development and accurate talent identification. The purpose of this study was to model the progression of male sub-elite swimmers’ performances during adolescence. The performances of 446 males (12–19 year olds) competing in seven individual events (50, 100, 200 m freestyle, 100 m backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, 200 m individual medley) over an eight-year period at an annual international schools swimming championship, run under FINA regulations were collected. Quadratic functions for each event were determined using mixed linear models. Thresholds of peak performance were achieved between the ages of 18.5 ± 0.1 (50 m freestyle and 200 m individual medley) and 19.8 ± 0.1 (100 m butterfly) years. The slowest rate of improvement was observed in the 200 m individual medley (20.7%) and the highest in the 100 m butterfly (26.2%). Butterfly does however appear to be one of the last strokes in which males specialise. The models may be useful as talent identification tools, as they predict the age at which an average sub-elite swimmer could potentially peak. The expected rate of improvement could serve as a tool in which to monitor and evaluate benchmarks.

Highlights

Elite-level athletes have been well characterised compared with sub-elite adolescents.Retrospective studies such as those conducted by Sokolovas [1], Costa et al [2] and Allen et al [3] have enabled the performance of individual top-ranked swimmers to be tracked as they progressed through their careers, in the anticipation that the process may map the path to potential elite performance.The majority of longitudinal studies in swimming have focused on adult athletes who had already reached elite status
The models for all three freestyle events and the backstroke event resulted in fixed quadratic random linear functions whereas those for the remaining three events showed the best fit as fixed quadratic random intercept functions (Table 2)
The results from the cross validation indicated that the fixed effects of the quadratic functions for all events fell within the 95% confidence intervals (C.I.)

Summary

Introduction

Elite-level athletes have been well characterised compared with sub-elite adolescents Retrospective studies such as those conducted by Sokolovas [1], Costa et al [2] and Allen et al [3] have enabled the performance of individual top-ranked swimmers to be tracked as they progressed through their careers, in the anticipation that the process may map the path to potential elite performance. The majority of longitudinal studies in swimming have focused on adult athletes who had already reached elite status. These studies aimed to characterise both the consistency and rate of development of individual performances [2,3,4,5] inter alia and claimed to enable practitioners the ability to predict potential medallists and/or determine realistic individual performance goals [6,7]. As improved TI and TD programmes become more widely implemented, former and current elite athletes are unlikely to reflect the pathway of future champions because they were products of an era of rudimentary TI

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