How competitive swimmers adapt their inter-limb coordination to drag perturbation

Biography

Ludovic Seifert is associate professor at the faculty of Sport Sciences of Rouen in France and works on Sport Biomechanics and Motor Control with a special focus on inter-limb coordination in relation to skills acquisition and high level of expertise achievement.

Synopsis

Swimming skill is mostly analysed in terms of performance outcomes. But understanding expertise goes beyond the ‘how fast can you swim’ question. Adaptability, considered as the capacity of participant to modify their behaviour to respond to subtle modification in the constraint acting on them, might also be a key concept to investigate. By artificially generating perturbation to the swim stroke in population differing in their expertise level, we hypothesised that better swimmer would exhibit better motor adaptability to constraints than recreational swimmers, brought about by a subtle blend between behavioural stability and flexibility.