One of the subjects on Faculty of sports that students must attend is Swimming 1 with basics of rescuing from water. Through the semester students get to know three basic swimming techniques – freestyle, breaststroke and backstroke. At the end of the semester they have to show their technical skills and physical performance on practical exam where they have to swim 400m. To pass the exam they have to finish on time designated for minimal grade.
The main purpose of our thesis was to find out which techniques does students choose for their exam, if the final time is affected by swimming techniques and if there are any differences regarding the gender. Analysis was done on the 151 students, 87 males and 64 females, which attended the subject in school year 2016/2017 and successfully finished swimming 400m with the positive grade. We established that the students choose all three techniques, some swam whole 400m in one technique and the others combined two or three techniques. As much as 56% of students decided to combine techniques, of which 75% combined breaststroke freestyle, 23% combined all three techniques, 2% combined freestyle and backstroke, but there was no one who would combine breaststroke and backstroke. More males than females swam the whole 400m in freestyle and more females than males swam the whole 400m in breaststroke. Our concern was also the final time and its correlation to swimming technique. Analysis showed that the final time of freestyle was faster for more than a minute from final times of breaststroke and combined techniques. Because of a high percentage of students who combined techniques we looked into these more exhaustively, especially into freestyle and backstroke combination. First we analysed the share of freestyle and breaststroke for individual length and found out that more than half of students swam freestyle in the first three and last two lengths. Also, the average swimming pace was correlating with the percentage of freestyle in each 50m. When the percentage was higher, the pace was faster and vice versa. There was also a correlation between the percentage of freestyle in whole 400m and final time. As the percentage of freestyle grow the final time was getting faster. Finally we were interested how swimming techniques were distributed regarding the gender. We confirmed the hypothesis that more males choose freestyle than females, while more females choose breaststroke than males. For combining techniques there was similar percentage of males (56%) and females (54%) who decided to do so.
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