Relationships between swimming style and dry-land strength in breaststroke

Abstract

In breaststroke, at each arm action corresponds one leg kick; therefore, compared to the other strokes (front crawl, backstroke and butterfly), the contribution of the lower limbs is more important. However, it can be observed that the same distance can be covered at similar velocities with different stroke length (SL) and, as a consequence, stroke rate (SR). Hence, it seems that breaststroke swimmers can use different styles to achieve their goals. Therefore, the assessment of upper and lower limbs strength becomes very important along with the style being used during breaststroke performance. Twenty-four male and twenty female national-level breaststroke swimmers were divided in two groups for each gender, according to their SR (low-SR and high-SR). They performed 100 m breaststroke all-out performance in a 50 m swimming pool. SR, SL and velocity (v) were measured. To assess upper and lower limbs strength, swimmers underwent dry-land chin-up and jump & reach tests. Dry-land tests did not correlate to v (p > 0.05). SL inversely correlated to chin-up and directly correlated to jump & reach (p < 0.01). Regardless to the gender, low-SR had lower chin-up results than high-SR (males 0.19 ± 0.03 vs. 0.24 ± 0.04 nr kg⁻¹, p < 0.01; females 0.13 ± 0.02 vs. 0.15 ± 0.03 nr kg⁻¹, p < 0.05) and jumped higher than high-SR (males 31.74 ± 0.50 vs. 25.11 ± 0.55 % height, p < 0.001; females 22.93 ± 0.33 vs. 20.54 ± 0.63 % height, p < 0.01) swimmers. Despite many factors are involved in determining swimming performance, upper and lower limbs strength seems to be linked to a different breaststroke style in our group of swimmers.