Investigation of swimming athlete's perceptions after exercise and its association with performance

Abstract

Introduction: It has been advocated that training programs must involve overload but also appropriate recovery given that the imbalance between these two variables may lead to a state of overtraining. This is particularly important for swimmers due to the increased risk of injury associated with high training volumes. In addition, it has been observed that swimmers report perceptions such as heaviness, discomfort, shortness of breath, pain and others that are not comprised in any questionnaire available in the literature. Therefore, the aim of this research is to investigate the perceptions of adult swimmers, test the reliability of its application during training sessions and its association with performance times and training load. It is hypothesized that swimmers will report similar perceptions and that these perceptions will correlate to the training load enabling to create a reliable tool for monitoring training programs. Methods: Participants will be asked before and after a regular training routine about their general perceptions. To guarantee that the selected perceptions are relevant and understood by the participants they will undertake a paper-based test. The questionnaire will be composed of the selected perceptions where the participants can rate each of them by a 5-point Likert scale (1-not at all, 2-a little, 3-moderate, 4-a lot, 5-extremelly). The participants will be asked to answer the questionnaire twice with one-week interval, before and after two similar training sessions. The questionnaire will be asked after a sprint during normal training routine. Performance times of one sprint will be recorded by a manual chronometer. The training load measured by the distance and the intensity of effort of each session will also be recorded. The intensity of effort will be investigated by the Borg scale of effort ranging from 6 to 20 points. To determine the reliability of the questionnaire an analysis of agreement will be performed for the questionnaire's answers between the sprints. To investigate the perception's association with performance times and training load the Pearson or Spearman's correlation coefficient will be reported depending on the sample distribution.A significance level of P<0,05 and confidence interval of 95% will be assumed for all analysis. (AU)