The Effect of Minor Muscle Stretching Exercises on the Motor Control and Swimming Speed of Young Swimmers

Sport has become a necessity for a healthy and balanced life today. Children who play sports regularly at a young age become adults who do sports later in their lives. Swimming is one of the sports branches that includes many factors such as aerobic and anaerobic endurance, strength, flexibility, speed, quickness, rhythm, coordination as well as sportive performance and technical skills. Swimming is not only a sport, but also provides a symmetrical and balanced development of some muscles as well as making use of free time, gaining strength and rehabilitation.

The primary function of the nervous system in all living things is movement. Parallel to the phylogenetic development, there is also an improvement in the movement function. The realization of a movement is not possible only with the operation of the pyramidal system, which is the primary movement system. In addition, the extrapyramidal system that will provide the most appropriate postural tone for the organ that will perform the voluntary movement towards the goal, the cerebellar system that will provide the coordination of the agonist antagonist muscles, and the awake state must be normal and the level of consciousness must be open for this movement. The sum of the systems that provide all this movement is called the motor system. The factor that ensures the harmonious operation of the movement emerging from this system is motor control.

Athletes must have a high level of fitness, strength, coordination, agility, speed and motor control to perform at an elite level with minimal injury risk. Dysfunctional movement patterns are directly related to the mechanism of injury. In addition, the improvement of motor control is directly related to the prevention of injury. It is very important to prevent injury in order to ensure continuity in sports in athletes.

Repetitive upper extremity movements imposed by freestyle swimming may lead to changes in muscle length and tension by paving the way for postural misalignment in adolescent swimmers . Study, revealed that there were great differences in sagittal stance angles of freestyle swimming female adolescent athletes compared to their non-swimming peers, and adolescent athletes engaged in swimming sports had far from the desired angles in sagial stance.

One of the parameters affecting swimming sport is muscle strength. While four techniques are used as freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke and butterfly, swimming speed is considered to be the most important performance indicator in all. Swimming speed is defined as completing the 25m or 50m swimming distance in the pool in the shortest time and is considered the most important feature of the swimmer that needs to be developed in terms of trainers. Lower extremity strength is also accepted as an important criterion in terms of starting swimming and especially completing the first 15 meters .