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
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2010Volume: 3
First Page: 92
Last Page: 94
Publisher ID: TOSSJ-3-92
DOI: 10.2174/1875399X010030100092
Article History:
Received Date: 05/07/2009Revision Received Date: 10/10/2009
Acceptance Date: 05/12/2009
Electronic publication date: 20/5/2010
Collection year: 2010
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.
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.