Compared to breathing on land, breathing while swimming is restricted and obstructed, also affecting the respiratory muscles. Also, training for respiratory muscle strength improves the swimming performance of individuals (Nahtigal, 2015). The purpose of the task was to determine the effects of swimming exercise on the strength of the respiratory muscles and lung volume of the child. The effects of regular swimming were compared with the effects of climbing.
We included 18 children between the ages of 6 and 10 in the research, half engaged in recreational swimming and participated as an experimental group, the other half engaged in recreational climbing and represented the control group. All subjects performed an initial and final measurement to measure the strength of the respiratory muscles. Between measurements there was a 10-week training process. They attended it once a week.
The results showed that there was no improvement in maximal inspiratory pressure after the training period in both groups. At maximum expiratory pressure, after the training period, there were statistically significant differences only in the control group but not in the experimental group.
When measuring the influence of the swimming course on the forced vital capacity and forced expiratory volume in 1 second, we found that there were no statistically significant differences between the groups in the final measurements. It has been shown that there is a significant improvement in the forced expiratory volume in 1 second and its proportion of prediction in swimmers compared to baseline.
We also compared the vital capacity measurements of the experimental and control groups. We found that there were no significant differences in the final vital capacity measurements. The vital capacity did not change significantly in both the first and second groups. In the experimental group, after the end of the training period, we found only a significant increase in the proportion of its prediction. We can conclude that recreational swimming practice in the tested children brings some, but still negligible, improvement in the strength of the respiratory muscles. Exercising once a week was not enough for visible progress in lung capacity, and children who are beginners in swimming do not yet practice exhaling in the water enough, which over time can show in greater strength of expiratory and inspiratory muscles.
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