Swimmers use hand paddles among other strength training protocols to increase their upper body`s strength (Payton and Lauder, 1995) and consequently their swimming speed (Maglischo, 1993). The effect of hand paddles on the motor pattern of the underwater stroke were studied by Monteil and Rouard (1994), who found that hand paddles did not cause great modifications in the temporal pattern of the movement, although the total duration of the stroke was increased. However, the above researchers used two - dimensional kinematic analysis techniques, despite of the three-dimensional nature of front crawl swimming (Schleihauf et al., 1983). The purpose of this research was to study the effect of hand paddles on the three - dimensional underwater stroke pattern of backstroke swimming. Fifteen female competitive swimmers voluntarily participated in the study. Each subject swam a series of 25m trials with constant speed, without and with two different sizes of hand paddles. The small hand paddles had a cross sectional area of 116 cm2 and the large ones 311 cm2. The underwater motion of each subject`s right arm was filmed using two S-VHS cameras, operating at 60 fields/s, which were located behind two underwater viewing windows. The spatial coordinates of selected points on the right arm were calculated using the DLT procedure with 30 control points and after the digital filtering of the raw data with a cut-off frequency of 6 Hz. The analysis of the data revealed that when large paddles were worn, the time to complete the arm stroke and the displacement of the hand during the glide phase were significantly increased. The total displacement of hip was significantly increased only when large paddles were worn, while peak vertical hand speed during the upward phase was greatly reduced. The velocities of the first upsweep phase push phase and second downsweep were also significantly decreased. From the results of the present study it was concluded that large hand paddles caused significant modifications in the motor pattern of the underwater stroke and thus the size of and paddles seemed to have a major effect in specificity of backstroke swimming training.
© Copyright 2007 12th Annual Congress of the European College of Sport Science, Jyväskylä, Finland - July 11-14th 2007. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.