RESEARCH ARTICLE


Longitudinal Assessment of Swimming Performance in the 200-m Freestyle Event



M. J. Costa1, 2, J. A. Bragada2, 3, D. A. Marinho2, 4, V. M. Reis1, 2, A. J. Silva1, 2, *, T. M. Barbosa2, 3
1 Department of Sport Sciences, Univesity of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro, Vila Real, Portugal
2 Research Center in Sports Science, Health and Human Development, Vila Real, Portugal
3 Department of Sport Sciences, Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, Bragança, Portugal
4 Department of Sport Sciences, Univesity of Beira-Interior, Covilhã, Portugal


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Creative Commons License
© 2010 Costa et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Sport Sciences, University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro, Vila Real, Portugal; Tel: +351 259350000; E-mail: Ajsilva@utad.pt


Abstract

The aim of this study was to track and analyze the 200-m Freestyle performance stability throughout elite swimmer's career. 29 Portuguese male top-50 were analyzed for seven consecutive seasons between 12 and 18 years old. Best performances were collected from ranking tables. Longitudinal assessment was performed based on two approaches: (i) mean stability was analyzed by descriptive statistics and ANOVA repeated measures for each season followed by a post-hoc test (Bonferroni test), (ii) normative stability was analyzed with self-correlation (Malina, 2001) and the Cohen's Kappa tracking index (Landis and Koch, 1977). There was a 200-m Freestyle performance enhancement from children to adult age. The overall career performance prediction was moderate. The change from 13 to 14 years can be a milestone, where the ability to predict the final swimmer's performance level strongly increases.

Keywords: stability, prediction, tracking, performance, elite swimmers.