Stability of elite freestyle performance from childhood to adulthood

• Autor(a) principal: Costa, Mário Jorge
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Outros Autores: Marinho, Daniel, Bragada, José, Silva, António, Barbosa, Tiago M.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/9559
• topic: Adolescent; Age Factors; Analysis of Variance; Athletes; Child; Humans; Longitudinal Studies; Male; Retrospective Studies; Athletic Performance; Physical Education and Training; Swimming

Stability of athletic performance is important for practitioners and coaches, since it allows the selection of appropriate training methods and prediction of ages for best results. We performed a longitudinal study of 1694 season-best performances of 242 elite-standard swimmers throughout their careers, from 12 to 18 years of age. Mean stability (descriptive statistics and one-way repeated-measures ANOVA, followed by a Bonferroni post-hoc test) and normative stability (Cohen's kappa tracking index and the Pearson correlation coefficient) were determined for seven consecutive seasons. Performance improvements in all events were observed (14.36-18.97%). Bonferroni post-hoc tests verified changes in almost all events assessed. Cohen's kappa demonstrated low stability (0.17-0.27) in relative performance. Pearson correlations only became high from 15 to 16 years in the 50-m and 100-m events, and from 16 to 17 years in the 200-m, 400-m, and 1500-m events. Our results show that: (a) swimmers should display a substantial improvement (14-19%) to become elite standard as adults, such as at 18 years; (b) 16 is the age at which the ability to predict adult performance increases markedly.