We examined effects of attentional focus on swimming speed. Participants' task was to swim one length of a pool (16 m) using the front crawl stroke. In Experiment 1, intermediate swimmers were given attentional focus instructions related to the crawl arm stroke or the leg kick, respectively. Participants were instructed to focus on “pulling your hands back” or “pushing the instep down” (internal focus), or on “pushing the water back/down” (external focus), respectively. Swim times were significantly shorter with an external focus. In Experiment 2, a control condition was included. Times were significantly faster in the external focus compared with both the internal focus and control conditions. These findings have implications for enhancing performance in swimming.
Efficiency in front-crawl stroke has been inferred primarily by means of the analysis of arm actions, specifically, stroke frequency and stroke length. The objective of the present study was to investigate whether swimming efficiency could be better assessed in children still learning the front-crawl stroke by analyzing the movement pattern as a whole. Forty-two children enrolled in private swimming programs volunteered to participate in the study. The task consisted of swimming 30 m as fast as possible. Three experts analyzed the movement pattern of the participants using a checklist. Both stroke frequency and stroke length were calculated. The correlation coefficients between the time taken to swim and both the stroke frequency and stroke length were not significant, but the total and components of the checklist scores were. Results indicate that the swimming efficiency of children learning the front-crawl stroke can be better assessed by analyzing their whole movement pattern.
Purpose. Arm stroke is a key variable of successful performance in front crawl swimming. In the present study, the effects of the arm stroke on the front crawl swimming performance were analysed by considering the complementarity of macroconsistency and micro-variability in the arm stroke as a hierarchically organized adaptive system. In this case, consistency is necessary to achieve outcomes reliably, and variability is fundamental for coping with environmental instability. Methods. Displacements of swimmers (n = 31) who competed in the 400-m freestyle race of the Paulista Master championship were captured in 4 moments (partial races 1-4). From the aerial and aquatic phases of the left and right arm strokes, macrostructure (components' relative timing) and microstructure (components' overall time) had their variability rates cal cu lated for all partial races on the basis of the biological coefficients of variation. Results. It was revealed that swimmers: (i) increased consistency of macrostructure related to the left arm aerial phase stroke in the final race; (ii) maintained consistency of microstructure across races; and (iii) presented macrostructure with inferior rate of variability to the microstructure in the final race. Conclusions. Given these results, coaches should emphasize instruction for swimmers to maintain the temporal relationship among arm stroke components (macrostructure) rather than focus on the components themselves (microstructure).
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