Stroke variety in long-term development of youth swimmers

INTRODUCTION: It is possible to compete in different swimming strokes at a single competition. The German Swimming Federation sup-ports stroke variety and underlines the importance of individual medley as a prerequisite for becoming an elite-level swimmer while focussing on big training loads at young ages at the same time (Lambertz, 2014). On the contrary, early stroke specialisation in age-group swimming is tempting for coaches to gain success at young ages. However, the literature lacks describing the process of speciali-sation in providing practical implementations (Dormehl & Williams, 2016). In a multivariate analysis of swimming performance, it has been shown that the determinants of success in swimming are non-stroke specific (Saavedra, Escalante, & Rodriguez, 2010). The aim of this study was to analyse German top-100 rankings if a stroke variety in good swimmers is evident. METHODS: To examine an influence of stroke variety in German competitive swimming the 100 best age-group swimming performances (i.e. long course) of eight subsequent years (2004-2013) were analyzed, focussing on the age-groups from 1993-1995 (male n = 1.862; female n = 1.993). The rankings of all swimmers who got into top 100 at the age of 18 (male n = 842, female n = 574) were traced back to analyse their rankings at earlier ages. The number of strokes achieved by these athletes within the top 100 at each age between 11 and 18 years were counted. Chi-square tests were performed to compare five different ranking clusters (ranking 1-3; 4-10; 11-30; 31-50; 51-100) as well as stroke variety. RESULTS: Results revealed a significant connection between the ranking and the number of strokes with 11 years from the top-3 ranked 18 year old athletes compared to all other clusters (p < 0.01). Similar connections were shown for the stroke variety in all other age groups and ranking clusters (p < 0.01). CONCLUSION: The present findings indicate that successful athletes do not specialize on one stroke over all competitions within a season, supporting previous suggestions of swimming being a late specialisation sport (Baker & Robertson-Wilson, 2003; Balyi, 2001; Sokolovas, 2006).