The Effect of Proposed Training Program for Enhancing and Developing the Arms Muscular Strength in the Free Swimming Amongst Physical Education Students at An-Najah National University

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of proposed training program for enhancing and developing the arms muscular strength in the freestyle swimming amongst physical education students at An-Najah National University. To achieve that, the study was carried out on a purposive sample that consisted of (24) PE male students who registered in swimming course (2) (2015- 2016), and they were divided equally into an experimental group (n= 12) and a control group (n=12). Then, the proposed training program was applied for (8) weeks with (3) training units per week. Before and after the training program implementation, physical and skill tests were conducted including: (pull-up test (10s), 1-RM bench press (kg), freestyle swimming with arms frequency (repetitions), freestyle swimming with arms only (s), freestyle swimming with arms only (m/s), freestyle swimming (s), and freestyle swimming (m/s). After the data collection, SPSS software was used to analyze results. The results of the study revealed that the proposed training program has affected all the variables under study, with a significance level between pre and post tests in favor of post tests, and the percentages of change were as follows: pull-up test (10s) (35.61%), 1-RM bench press (kg) (11.58%), freestyle swimming with arms frequency (repetitions) (10.83%), freestyle swimming with arms only (s) (11.46%), freestyle swimming with arms only (m/s) (8.84%), freestyle swimming (s) (12.45%), and freestyle swimming (m/s) (14.87%). Therefore, the results of the study has shown that the traditional or regular training program has affected all the variables under study except pull-up test (10s), with a significance level between pre and post tests in favor of post tests, and the percentages of change were as follows: 1-RM bench press (kg) (4.68%), freestyle swimming with arms frequency (repetitions) (4.13%), freestyle swimming with arms only (s) (7.43%), freestyle swimming with arms only (m/s) (7.76%), freestyle swimming (s) (6.37%), and freestyle swimming (m/s) (7.07%). Finally, the results of the study indicated that there were statistically significant differences in the post test of all variables between the experimental and control groups in favor of the experimental group. The researcher recommends several recommendations where the most important is to give the arms muscular strength a great importance during the program training preparation to the sport season for its direct effect on developing the performance level of physical education students