Relative contribution of arms and legs in 30 s fully tethered front crawl swimming

The relative contribution of arm stroke and leg kicking to maximal fully tethered front crawl swimming performance remains to be solved. Twenty-three national level young swimmers (12 male and 11 female) randomly performed 3 bouts of 30 s fully tethered swimming (using the whole body, only the arm s...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Morouço, Pedro G., Marinho, Daniel, Izquierdo Redín, Mikel, Neiva, Henrique P., Marqués, Mário C.
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2015
País:España
Recursos:Universidad Pública de Navarra
Repositorio:Academica-e. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad Pública de Navarra
OAI Identifier:oai:academica-e.unavarra.es:2454/30349
Acesso em linha:https://hdl.handle.net/2454/30349
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Front crawl swimming
Arm stroke
Leg kicking
Descrição
Resumo:The relative contribution of arm stroke and leg kicking to maximal fully tethered front crawl swimming performance remains to be solved. Twenty-three national level young swimmers (12 male and 11 female) randomly performed 3 bouts of 30 s fully tethered swimming (using the whole body, only the arm stroke, and only the leg kicking). A load-cell system permitted the continuous measurement of the exerted forces, and swimming velocity was calculated from the time taken to complete a 50m front crawl swim. As expected, with no restrictions swimmers were able to exert higher forces than that using only their arm stroke or leg kicking. Estimated relative contributions of arm stroke and leg kicking were 70.3% versus 29.7% for males and 66.6% versus 33.4% for females, with 15.6% and 13.1% force deficits, respectively. To obtain higher velocities, male swimmers are highly dependent on themaximumforces they can exert with the arm stroke ( = 0.77, < 0.01), whereas female swimmers swimming velocity ismore related to whole-body mean forces ( = 0.81, < 0.01). The obtained results point that leg kicking plays an important role over short duration high intensity bouts and that the used methodology may be useful to identify strength and/or coordination flaws.