Differences Between Mens And Womens Performance In Swimming

Introduction
The Olympic Games and World Championships are the top swimming meetings. The best men and women swimmers
from all over the world participate in these games. The great number of the men and women swimmers and strong
competition result in achieved a lot of records. The training programs with regard to the duration, the quantity and the
intensity are almost in the same levels for both sexes. However, the existence of morphological, functional as well as
psychological differences between the two sexes has led to the establishment of certain differentiations to the programs
of women. The morphological and functional differences of body and the various organs of the body play an important
role to the movement of body in the water. The records of women compared to the records of men are fall sort of in the
events of short distances (speed), as much as the middle distances (semi endurance) and the long distances (endurance).
In recent years it is observed that women’s records tend to approach those of men. The purpose of this study was to
write down the records of various events of men and women swimmers and compare them.

Methods
The records of men and women swimmers who were in the first eight (8) ranks of the final classification in the 10th X
World Swimming Championship in Barcelona (20-27 July 2003) were used for this study.

Results
The events of men and women swimmers, the average of their records and the standard deviation of the eight best
records of the final classification are reported in the following tables 1, 2 and 3*.

Discussion/Conclusions:

In the events where the participation of the aerobic system of energy production was bigger,
that is in long distances (800-1500 m) and middle distances (200-400 m), the women showed the smallest differences in
the records compared to men swimmers. On the contrary in the events of speed which required more strength the
differences were larger. The styles and distances of swimming as well as the percentages (%) of the difference of
records of women from men swimmers can be seen in table 4.
Therefore it is observed that women’s records fall short of 10% in
relation to those of men swimmers. Consequently, in the 200 m
butterfly percentage of female swimmers 91.1% of the best male
performance, in 200 m freestyle it was 91.2%, 92.2% for 200 m
individual medley, 92.7 for 1500 m freestyle, 92.9% for 200 m
backstroke and breaststroke and 93.6 for 800 m freestyle. In
conclusion, as time passes, it appears that female swimmers
records will approach the corresponding records of male
swimmers. However, the records of male will be higher than those
of female swimmers because there are physiological,
morphological and psychological differences between the two
sexes as well as other differences.
*F.I.N.A. 2003

NOTA: O texto com a iconografia está no anexo.

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