44 Chapter 3 Inclusion criteria We included talented swimmers of which some swimmers ultimately made it to the top (elite swimmers) and others did not (high-competitive swimmers). The inclusion criteria were: (1) swimmers who had at least one swim performance in the age category of 22 years or older (males) or 20 years or older (females). Based on research of Allen et al. (2014), we suggest that this is in general the expected minimum age for swimmers to achieve their career best performances. To ensure a dataset representing the developmental pathway towards peak performance, we solely included (2) swim performances up to and including the swimmer’s career best swim performance. Furthermore we selected only those swimmers who (3) where between the 12 and 24 years old; (4) had performance data of at least two consecutive swimming seasons (5) had two observations within a swimming season and (6) had season best rST’s within the performance benchmarks. The performance benchmarks were taken as indicator for future performances towards elite level swimming. Therefore swimmers performing within these performance benchmarks were in the present study considered as talented swimmers. The performance benchmarks were based on previous research of Post et al. (2020) and reflect the maximal season best rST for elite swimmers per age and per sex (see Appendix A). Performance benchmarks were set to be monotone, meaning that with every successive maximal season best rST lower than the previous, the benchmark will decrease towards the value of this season best rST, but with every successive maximal season best rST higher than the previous, the benchmark will remain at the same value. Table 1 represents the male/female distribution and the number of observations (i.e. total rSTs) for each performance group included for analysis, with an average of 3.6 ± 2.0 observations per swimmer. Table 1. Total number of swimmers (N = 3,199) and observations (N =8,005) for each performance group specified by sex for the analysis on within-season performance progression (WSPP). Males Females Individuals Observations Individuals Observations Elite 196 638 360 1,062 High-competitive 1,279 3,085 1,364 3,220 Note. Elite males: best rST ≤ 103.9%; Elite females: best rST ≤ 105.8%; High-competitive males: 103.9% < best rST ≤ 114.0%; High-competitve females: 105.8% < best rST ≤ 115.1%.
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