Background: Technical assessment in front crawl requires objective and repeatable indicators to support training prescription and monitoring. Full-tethered swimming has been proposed as an alternative approach for controlling effort and quantifying in-water force production, but its ability to reproduce the kinematic organization of maximal free-swimming, particularly in front crawl, remains unclear. Methods: Twenty-eight competitive swimmers aged 14-18 years performed, in random order and using the front crawl technique, a 30 s full-tethered maximal test and a 25 m free-swimming sprint with in-water starts. Video recordings obtained from above- and underwater cameras were used to determine cycle duration, index of coordination, the relative duration of the upper-limbs cycle phases and the within-cycle timing of three lower-limbs actions. Repeated measures comparisons were used. Results: Compared with free-swimming, full-tethered front crawl showed a longer cycle duration (* = 0.120 s, 95% CI 0.076-0.163, p = 0.001) and a more positive index of coordination (* = 7.306, 95% CI 5.487-9.126, p = 0.001). Significant experimental condition effects were observed for all upper-limbs phases (p < 0.001), indicating substantial temporal reorganization of the front crawl cycle. Significant experimental condition vs upper-limbs side interactions were found for downsweep, upsweep and recovery phases (all p * 0.029). Conclusions: Maximal full-tethered swimming does not fully reproduce the kinematic pattern of unimpeded front crawl sprint in adolescent swimmers. Although data obtained with full-tethered swimming may provide useful information for biomechanical assessment, it should be interpreted with caution when extrapolating to free-swimming coordination patterns, particularly in front crawl.
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