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

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) and dv normalized to v (dv/v). Another two 25 m bouts with and without carrying a perturbation device were made to estimate active drag coefficient (C-Da). 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, dv and dv/v), cluster 2 with anthropometrics (ie, S) and cluster 3 with a high hydrodynamic profile (ie, C-Da). The variable that seems to discriminate better the clusters was the dv/v (F = 53.680; P < .001), followed by the dv (F = 28.506; P < .001), C-Da (F = 21.025; P < .001), S (F = 6.297; P < .01) and v (F = 5.375; P = .01). Stepwise discriminant analysis extracted 2 functions: Function 1 was mainly defined by dv/v and S (74.3% of variance), whereas function 2 was mainly defined by C-Da (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.