The Effects of Swimming and Swimming Complemented With Water Walking on Spirometry Values

Spirometry is a standard pulmonary function test that measures how an individual inhales or exhales volumes of air as a function time. It is the most important and most frequently performed pulmonary function testing procedure, having become indispensable for the prevention, diagnosis and evaluation of various respiratory impairments. However, there have been only a few studies addressing the effect of physical activity on pulmonary function test results and investigating the association between body composition and respiratory parameters in sports activities [1,2,3]. The objective of this study was verify if there are differences in spirometry values in children aged between 6 and 12 years who practice swimming complemented with water walking at the end of each session and those who only practice swimming. In this study participated 28 subjects (mean age, 7.68 ± 1.16 years) and was divided into two groups: swimming group (SG) (N=9) and swimming complemented with water walking group (SWWG) (N=19). The study was performed in 12 weeks with 3 moments of evaluation (M1, M2 and M3) , with two sessions per week of 45 minutes each, we wanted to identify the benefits in pulmonary function - Forced Vital Capacity (FVC), Forced Expiratory Volume in 1 second (FEV1) and Peak Expiratory Flow (PEF). The water walking activity occurred in the end of each session for 6 minutes, performed in straight line with the water level at the children's chest. The spirometry tests were realized with the microQuark Spirometer®. For the analysis of the results, we used descriptive statistics, the Shapiro Wilk test for testing the normality of the sample and for the inferential statistics the Mann-Whitney tests, Friedman's Anova, and d-Cohen for the magnitude of effect.