The effect of the horizontal vs. vertical PAPE protocol on the swim start performance in adolescent male

ABSTRACT

Post-activation performance enhancement (PAPE) is referred to enhancement in muscular performance due to high-intensity voluntary contractions. This study aimed to examine the effect of the horizontal vs. vertical PAPE protocol on the start performance in swimming. Sixteen swimmers (age: 13.71 ± 0.95 years; height: 169.43 ± 9.68 cm; body mass: 58.47 ± 7.64 kg) performed three warm-up protocols: (i) a swim-specific warm-up (SWU); (ii) back squat (BS) followed SWU (SWUB); (iii) barbell hip thrust (BHT) followed SWU (SWUH) which consisted of 1 set of 3 reps at 80% 1RM. Rest times are evaluated individually. The findings of this study indicate that SWUB has no beneficial effect on any phase in all examined parameters, while SWUH has a slight improvement only in the take-off phase compared to SWUB (p < 0.05). BHT is better compared to BS as a PAPE stimulus for swimming, but there is no positive effect on 50 m swimming time compared to SWU (p > 0.05). In conclusion, to the best of our knowledge, the effect of BHT as a PAPE stimulus was investigated for swimming for the first time, but results show that neither BS nor BHT has a positive effect on 50 m swimming performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Warm-up
• swimming start
• hip thrust
• kinematic
• back squat

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by The Scientific Research Projects Coordination Unit of Akdeniz University [Project ID: TYL-2019-4951].