Background and aims: Whether athlete advantages in temporal processing primarily reflect sport-specific temporal knowledge or transfer to neutral laboratory judgments remains unresolved. Competitive swimming offers a theoretically informative case because successful performance depends on the precise regulation of pace and rhythm across repeated actions in a sensory-constrained environment. The present study examined whether swimming expertise is associated with superior performance in a neutral visual suprasecond duration-discrimination task and whether any expertise-related advantage remains observable across sensory contexts. Methods: Two independent experiments were conducted, each including 20 Expert Swimmers and 20 Amateur Controls. Participants completed a visual two-alternative forced-choice duration-discrimination task in which task difficulty was manipulated by the between-interval duration difference (200, 500, 1,000, and 2,000 ms). Experiment 1 was administered under silent visual conditions, whereas Experiment 2 used the same visual task while presenting task-irrelevant rhythmic auditory stimulation concurrently with each visual interval. Accuracy and reaction time (RT) were analyzed separately within each experiment. Results: In both experiments, discrimination accuracy increased as task difficulty decreased, confirming the effectiveness of the difficulty manipulation. Across difficulty levels, Expert Swimmers showed higher accuracy than Amateur Controls under both silent and task-irrelevant rhythmic conditions. Evidence for a larger expert advantage under higher difficulty emerged in Experiment 1 but was not reproduced in Experiment 2. Reaction-time findings did not indicate a generalized speed advantage, although difficulty-related variation in response patterning was observed. The rhythmic auditory background did not materially alter the overall accuracy advantage shown by Expert Swimmers. Conclusion: Swimming expertise was associated with enhanced performance in a neutral visual suprasecond duration-discrimination task across two sensory contexts. These findings indicate that the observed advantage was expressed primarily in discrimination accuracy rather than generalized response speed and remained observable when the task was embedded in a task-irrelevant rhythmic context. More broadly, the results support a bounded-transfer interpretation: swimmer expertise appears to extend beyond overtly sport-specific temporal content, but the present evidence does not support claims of unrestricted domain-general timing.

Whether acute dry-land preconditioning improves jump height and swimming outcomes in breaststroke remains unclear. This original experimental study used a randomized crossover design to compare two whole-body vibration (WBV) protocols and a unilateral BOSU-based protocol with an active stable-ground half-squat Control condition in 14 competitive breaststroke swimmers. Sessions were separated by at least 72 h. Countermovement jump (CMJ) height, squat jump (SJ) height, 25 m breaststroke split time, and 50 m breaststroke final time were assessed before and after each condition. Linear mixed-effects models showed significant Condition × Time interactions for CMJ height and 25 m split time, but not for SJ height or 50 m final time. Planned interaction contrasts showed greater pre-to-post changes than Control for both WBV conditions in CMJ height and 25 m split time. WBV 4 mm produced the largest point estimates for both primary outcomes, although superiority was not established. BOSU estimates were favourable but non-significant. WBV therefore showed the most consistent evidence of favourable acute responses relative to an active half-squat Control, whereas unilateral BOSU remained promising but inconclusive. Swimming findings apply only to the fixed assessment sequence, and the 25 m split should be interpreted as a composite early-race indicator.

This study examined visually guided spatial updating and endpoint estimation under visual-only conditions and assessed whether performance varied by distance, cue direction, and swimming training background. Thirty-six right-handed male participants aged 18–20 years, including expert swimmers and amateur controls, completed a cue–target spatial orientation task with two distance conditions, short and long, and four cue directions, N, E, S, and W. Movement time, spatial error distance, and proportional movement time were analyzed using 2 × 2 × 4 mixed-design repeated-measures ANOVAs. Bayesian independent-samples comparisons were further conducted to quantify evidence for the null hypothesis of no robust group differences. The results indicated that task demands were the main determinants of performance. Compared with the short-distance condition, the long-distance condition yielded longer movement time, larger spatial errors, and higher proportional movement time, suggesting increased demands on spatial updating and movement execution. Cue direction also affected proportional movement time and spatial error distance, indicating direction-specific differences in visual cue integration and reference-frame transformation. By contrast, no robust overall group differences were found across the three primary behavioral measures, and the Bayesian analyses generally supported the null model. Although a significant Group × Distance interaction was observed for spatial error distance, this interaction reflected a group-related difference in the extent to which error increased from the short- to the long-distance condition, rather than evidence for a consistent expert advantage. Overall, performance in the present visual-only cue–target task was driven mainly by visuospatial updating load, attentional allocation, and task structure, whereas swimming-related expertise was not consistently expressed under the current task constraints.

Efficient segmental pitch control is critical for butterfly swimming propulsion and alignment, yet its role in youth performance remains unclear. This study quantified head, shoulder, and hip pitch kinematics using wearable inertial measurement units (IMUs) in 41 competitive swimmers (9–11 years). Participants performed two maximal 25-m butterfly trials and were classified into faster and slower groups. Pitch angle, velocity, frequency, time, and pitch deviation index were extracted. Between-group differences were assessed using independent t-tests, and associations with performance were examined using Pearson correlations. Faster swimmers exhibited smaller head pitch angles during the Breath phase (p < 0.001, d = −2.01), along with greater shoulder pitch velocities and frequencies (all p < 0.05, d = 0.67–1.07). They also demonstrated shorter pitch times and lower pitch deviation indices (all p < 0.05, d = 0.66–1.92), indicating more efficient and stable movement patterns. In contrast, hip kinematics showed fewer and less consistent differences between groups. Several head and shoulder variables during the Breath phase were moderately correlated with sprint time (r = 0.32–0.43, p < 0.05). These findings suggest that sprint butterfly performance in youth swimmers is primarily associated with more controlled and stable upper-body pitch motion, particularly during breathing.