Innovative approaches for assessing and monitoring swimming performance

This doctoral dissertation provides insight into innovative approaches for assessing and monitoring swimming performance. To achieve this goal, economical instrumentation, easy-to-use, and accessible to every swimming coach, has been employed, along with methodologies that are equally easily implementable for anyone wishing to analyse the parameters characterizing swimming performance studied in the doctoral dissertation. The initial section offers a general introduction regarding the description of the sport under study and the literature on the methodologies and instrumentation used for monitoring in swimming. Following this, the tools used in this doctoral dissertation were introduced and described. In the subsequent four chapters, the studies conducted during these years of research are described. The first three chapters focus on studies conducted using the metronome, while the fourth chapter addresses the utilization of the Swim Resister. In particular, the first chapter aimed to develop a methodology that uses the metronome to constrain the swimmers' stroke rate with the aim to monitor changes in stroke length during two different periods of the season. The second chapter compares the effects of drafting tactic on the drafter, as far as muscle fatigue, muscle activity, and swimming efficiency are concerned. The third chapter investigates the stages of sensorimotor adaptation to an individually defined rhythm imposed by a metronome used during swimming training sessions in order to assess the time needed by the athlete to adopt the new race pace without metronome guidance. The fourth and final chapter establishes the test-retest reliability in calculating load-velocity profiles in front crawl using the Swim Resister.