Comparison of competitive performance across age-groups in greek male and female swimmers.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare performance times in children and adolescent age-groups and evaluate their difference to men and women at distances of 50, 100, 200, 400 m front crawl. The ten best performance times achieved the year 2013 in the categories, children boys-girls-A, children boys-girls-B, children boys-girls, adolescent boys-girls, were compared to men and women. Performance of men was better than all other categories at all distances (F16,129=11.78; p<0.05). Improved performance was observed in each age-group compared with the previous one (p<0.05), however, there was no difference between children and adolescents at any distance (p>0.05). The performance of women was better at all distances compared to girls-A and -B (F16,129=9.30; p<0.05). The calculated change per year in distance of 50, 100, 200 and 400 m is 0.8, 0.8, 0.7, 0.8 and 2.1, 2.0, 1.9, 1.7% per year for male and female swimmers respectively. However, the rate of change is high at the categories of boys-girls-A-B (girls: 1-3%, boys: 3-6%) but decreased in boys-girls category, especially in distances of 200 and 400 m (-1.0 to 3.0%). All age categories present similar performance difference independent of distance, compared to adult male-female. The rate of performance improvement was high in children but decreased in young swimmers. It is important for Greek swimmers to focus on maintaining a high rate of improvement after puberty.