Effect Of Breath Retention On The Development Of Swimming Skills In Preschool Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Little research has examined breathing strategies for preschool aged swimmers. The standard Canadian learn-to-swim program focuses on exhaling while performing swimming skills. In pre-school aged children, the attention demands of exhalation combined with the attention demands of coordinating the arms, legs and body position to execute a swimming skill may exceed a preschooler's attentional capacity. Alternate private programs teach children to hold their breath for the first number of skill levels guided by the belief that breath retention makes children more buoyant and feel safer in the water atmosphere. PURPOSE: To examine the effect of exhalation and breath retention breathing strategies on the development of swimming skills and perceived comfort in the water in preschool aged children. METHODS: Skill development and overall comfort in the water were examined in four level 2 swim classes (N = 16, M = 4.8 years, SD = 1.52 years); two classes were randomly assigned to be taught to exhale while performing front glides, back glides, front floats, and back floats, and two classes were taught to hold their breath. Each skill was rated by three swim instructors on the first and last week of an eight week program; the Modified Erbaugh Rating Scale was used to rate the front glide, rating scales were developed for the front float, back float and back glide. Inter-rater reliability for all but the pretest back glide (0.68) ranged between 0.89 and 1.00. Change scores from pretest to posttest were compared across groups by independent t-tests. RESULTS: The classes utilizing the breath retention strategy showed significantly greater improvement for the front (p<.01) and back (p=.03) glides and back float (p=.05), and a trend towards greater improvement for the front float (p=.07). The groups did not differ substantially on overall comfort in the water. CONCLUSIONS: The results show that there is an overall increase in skill development when preschool children were taught to hold their breath rather than exhaling while performing front floats, back floats, front glides and back glides. Thus, the coordination components of the skills should be learned before the skills are made more complex by adding the breathing components.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".