Strength and Conditioning for Competitive Swimming in Today's World

The most essential part to excelling in any competitive sport is training and practice. Training helps us improve on technique, speed, endurance and strength needed for any sport. Various sports have various different training methods that are best suited to the specific sport played. Over the years new developments arise in training techniques for sports that help to further improve and be more beneficial to athletes thus changing previous training programs. Most people would say that the best way to train for any sport is just to keep playing it more and more, for example if you are a soccer player then just keep playing more soccer, or if you run the 100m dash then just keep doing it over and over and you're bound to improve. This may be somewhat true, however in today's world research study's show otherwise and inform us that strength training and conditioning help in athletic training a lot more then just playing the specific sport as practice. In this paper I will be showing the benefits of strength training and conditioning and their state today through swimming. We will look at swimming training programs for a front crawl 100m Olympic competitor.

Swimming had been practiced as early as 2500 BC in Egypt and later, it was practiced in Assyrian, Greek, and Roman civilizations. Competitive swimming however began in Europe around 1800 with breaststroke being the only known stroke. The trudgen today known as front crawl was later introduced in 1873 by John Arthur Trudgen, who had learnt it from the Native Americans. Richard Cavill further improved this stroke in 1902 with the flutter kick. swimming however wasn't part of the Olympics until the 1896 games held in Athens, Greece, since then swimming has come along way as a competitive sport with more strokes, faster times and new training techniques. As a result in the popularity of swimming the world's first swimming association Federation Internationale de Natation de Amateur (FINA) was founded in 1908.

Through the decades most swimmers and coaches have believed that the best way to improve in swimming is to put in maximum hrs in the pool. Most Olympic swimmers could swim from any where between 6 km to 10 km per day as part of their training program. However in the modern world today, researchers have proved that swimmers need to incorporate out of pool workout programs to actually significantly improve their swimming speed. US physiologist Dave Costill who was on an expert research team quoted "Most competitive swimming events last less than two minutes. How can training for three to four hours a day at speeds that are markedly slower than competitive pace prepare the swimmer for the maximal efforts of competition?" His research together with other researchers is contained in a book called Ð''Strength Training for Swimmers'. The book is different as it is not written from a coach's point of view but instead is a compilation of research into swim training, scientific analysis of the demands of competitive swimming and proven methods from running training that optimize performance. Threw their research they have proved that by increasing the meters per day swam there is no real advantage. They established that high volume swimming inhibits power development and not actual speed. This team of scientists has done extensive research over the decades and has come to the conclusion that Ð''The volume of training has no influence on swim performance. Faster, not longer training is the key to swimming success'. The researchers also alert us of two internal body changes that can negotiate a competitive swimmers performance which are; depletion of glycogen muscle stores, which one would want to have in high volumes as it is the only fuel available for sustained high-intensity muscle contractions required in the 100m front crawl dash. The other is Fatigue and depletion of fast-twitch muscle fibers which are essential for the high muscle power required to produce the fastest swimming speeds. Swimmers have a high proportion of fast-twitch fibers and high-volume training can change these into slow-twitch types.

We have looked at the advantages of why a swimmer should incorporate strength training in their training program rather then train the traditional way which includes clocking in maximum pool hours, let us look at how it is been done today and various exercise that enhance a swimmers performance. Strength programs should be specific to the stroke the competitor is swimming, meaning they should be explicit to the muscles in use for that stroke. For the front crawl stroke, the main actions that produce forward propulsion through the water are the 'arm pull down' through the water, which propels the swimmer forward and the 'leg kick', which alternates hip flexion and extension of the legs. In addition, competitive