If you haven't heard of swimming flumes, imagine a large chamber in which the swimmer floats. Water can flow through the chamber at controlled rates, and if the subject swims against the current at the correct speed he/she will remain stationary. This will then allow air breathed out to be collected via tubes and analysed, and the metabolic strain of the exercise can be determined. The development of these chambers allowed early researchers in Sweden to describe the exercise stress of swimming in an objective way, and the findings still form the basis for the design of many modern training techniques

Another piece of research from the mid-1980s first highlighted the application of the specificity principle to swimming. This served to confirm the intuitive logic which suggests that training upper-body muscles specifically for swimming has a greater effect on both oxygen uptake during swimming and swim-time performance than more general forms of training. The research also highlighted the possibility of using dry-land equipment such as weights or swim-benches to train upper-body musculature and improve swim performance. The suggestion by some that swim training is all about technique, once a certain level of physical fitness has been reached, has been proved wrong by the application of these more advanced training aids.

By reviewing the research, one can see that much of this early work was indeed valuable. For instance, the finding that peak oxygen uptake during swimming was influenced relatively more by swim training than maximal oxygen uptake during running is by run training emphasised the importance of quality training sessions for swimmers. But perhaps the greatest impact observed by swimmers themselves was delayed until the late-1980s and early-1990s when the amount and scope of research conducted into swimming increased rapidly. The possibility of overtraining was highlighted (see Ian Wilson's case study in Peak Performance 49) and the continuous very large training loads that had become the norm for elite swimmers fortunately became modified by periodisation and tapering programmes


freestyle swimming techniques