Young Swimmers’ Classification Based on Kinematics, Hydrodynamics, and Anthropometrics

Abstract

The aim of this article has been to classify swimmers based on kinematics, hydrodynamics, and anthropometrics. Sixty-seven young swimmers made a maximal 25 m front-crawl to measure with a speedometer the swimming velocity (v), speed-fluctuation (dv) anddvnormalized tov(dv/v). Another two 25 m bouts with and without carrying a perturbation device were made to estimate active drag coefficient (CDa). Trunk transverse surface area (S) was measured with photogrammetric technique on land and in the hydrodynamic position. Cluster 1 was related to swimmers with a high speed fluctuation (ie,dvanddv/v), cluster 2 with anthropometrics (ie,S) and cluster 3 with a high hydrodynamic profile (ie,CDa). The variable that seems to discriminate better the clusters was thedv/v(F= 53.680;P< .001), followed by thedv(F= 28.506;P< .001),CDa(F= 21.025;P< .001),S(F= 6.297;P< .01) andv(F= 5.375;P= .01). Stepwise discriminant analysis extracted 2 functions: Function 1 was mainly defined bydv/vandS(74.3% of variance), whereas function 2 was mainly defined byCDa(25.7% of variance). It can be concluded that kinematics, hydrodynamics and anthropometrics are determinant domains in which to classify and characterize young swimmers’ profiles.