A comparison of blocked and random practice on acquisition of swimming skills

The purpose of the present research was to study the effect of contextual interference on the acquisition of complex and continuous swimming skills. 20 girls with an age of 8-10 participated in the research and successfully performed the basic swimming skills. The participants were randomly divided into two practice groups: blocked practice and random practice. Each group participated in 36 exercise sessions and acquisition tests were administered on the 7th, 15th, 24th, and 32nd sessions. The data was analyzed using mixed ANOVA at the 0.05 significance level and in PASW software. The results suggested the effectiveness of both blocked and random practice on the acquisition of the skills. In general, the results indicate that contextual interference can have a positive effect on the performance of swimming skills