Objectives

Our objective was to study performance trade-offs in elite athletes competing in a multi-event sport requiring a combination of aptitudes that might conflict each other. Swimmers competing in the individual medley, in particular, might face trade-offs as they have to swim (in this specific order) a quarter of the distance in butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle within a single race.

Methods

We applied multivariate mixed models to analyse 28 years (1991–2019) of publicly available data on men (N = 121) and women (N = 131) swimmers competing for the 200 m individual medley in the semi-final and final rounds of Olympics and world championships.

Results

At the among-individual level, performance in the backstroke and breaststroke were negatively correlated in both men (r_ind = −0.264 ± 0.126) and women (r_ind = −0.453 ± 0.103). At the within-individual level, there was a negative correlation between performance in the first and final 50 m of the race in men (r_e = −0.181 ± 0.055), but not in women (r_e = 0.001 ± 0.058).

Conclusions

To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a trade-off between backstroke and breaststroke swimming styles. Such a trade-off might be caused by various extrinsic (e.g., allocation of training time across the four strokes) and intrinsic (e.g., body morphology and muscle physiology) constraints on human performance. The difference in the pattern of within-individual correlations between men and women aligns with pacing strategies described in the literature. Further research is required to better understand the nature of the trade-offs detected here, which could potentially help improving training strategies for the “generalist” individual medley swimmer.

中文翻译：

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精英游泳运动员的表现权衡

目标

我们的目标是研究精英运动员在一项多项目运动中的表现权衡，这些运动需要可能相互冲突的才能的组合。特别是参加个人混合泳的游泳运动员可能会面临权衡，因为他们必须在一场比赛中以蝶泳、仰泳、蛙泳和自由泳的方式游出四分之一距离（按此特定顺序）。

方法

我们应用多元混合模型分析了 28 年（1991-2019）关于男子（N  = 121）和女子（N  = 131）游泳运动员在奥运会半决赛和决赛中争夺 200 米个人混合泳的公开数据和世界锦标赛。

结果

在个体水平上，仰泳和蛙泳的表现在男性（r _ind  = -0.264 ± 0.126）和女性（r _ind  = -0.453 ± 0.103）中均呈负相关。在个体水平上，男性在比赛的第一个和最后一个 50 米的表现之间存在负相关（r _e  = -0.181 ± 0.055），但在女性中没有（r _e  = 0.001 ± 0.058）。

结论

据我们所知，这是仰泳和蛙泳游泳风格之间权衡的首次展示。这种权衡可能是由对人类表现的各种外在（例如，跨越四次击球的训练时间分配）和内在（例如，身体形态和肌肉生理学）限制引起的。男性和女性之间个体内部相关性模式的差异与文献中描述的起搏策略一致。需要进一步研究以更好地了解此处检测到的权衡的性质，这可能有助于改进“通才”个人混合泳运动员的训练策略。