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If you randomly sample 20 swim coaches and ask them what should be the purpose of dryland training, you’ll likely get 20 answers. If you were to ask me that same question at 20 different points throughout the year, you’d also get 20 answers. Given this, my ability to answer hypotheticals surrounding dryland training for swimmers is a bit limited. …
“SWIM YOUR WAY AND WIN HOWEVER YOU CAN” Some swimmers adopt this approach on their own when you stop paying attention: they prefer to go easy during the race, wait patiently for the right moment and shoot forward on the home straight. These athletes are very sure of themselves, cautious thinkers, audacious and driven. They don’t push too early, compete …
Repeated bouts of high-intensity exercise lead to a pronounced accumulation of hydrogen cations (H+), a by-product of anaerobic metabolism that has been shown to play causative roles in peripheral fatigue. β-alanine (BA) supplementation is effective to increase intracellular carnosine content, a dipeptide whose pKa of 6.83 falls within the mid-point of the pH transit range in skeletal muscle (pH ~ …
There is variation regarding recommendations for children and adolescents carrying schoolbags. Guidelines for safe loads are mostly within 10%–15% of body weight (BW) range but include values as low as 5% and as high as 20%. Some biomechanical studies suggest that the schoolbag weight of 10% of BW may be enough to cause changes in kinematics, body posture and muscular strain. Methods of …
Hypertension (HTN), characterized by increased blood pressure (BP), is quantitatively the most important risk factor for premature cardiovascular disease (CVD). Self-myofascial release (SMR) is a type of myofascial release technique which incorporates elements of massage to reduce soft tissue pain, inflammation, and delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS). Methods A total of 15 (M = 8, F = 7) healthy subjects between the …
Based on the circadian rhythms of hormone levels, gene expression, and core body temperature, it could be expected that the best performance in terms of strength, flexibility, alertness, and anaerobic power output occurs in the late afternoon. Indeed, improvements of 3.6% for 50 m, 1.9% for 100 m, and 0.8% for 400 m swimming performance were observed in the afternoon/evening …
Previous studies have shown that shooting accuracy is a crucial factor distinguishing between winning and losing basketball teams. Battle rope (BR) interval training is a low-impact, total-body, and intense metabolic modality. Methods Thirty male well-trained Division-I basketball players (age range: 18–25 years; basketball training: 6.7 ± 3.8 years) who had not sustained neuromuscular injury in the prior 6 months participated …
Viscoelasticity is the ability to return of a material to return to a position after an extended force application. Dynamic tissues (muscles, tendons, ligaments) possess viscoelastic structures. The ideal mechanism and benefits of stretching are uncertain, but previous work suggests constant-torque is more beneficial than constant-angle for improving muscle creep, resulting in a decrease in stiffness. This creep is the …
The squat is a popular dry-land exercise for swimming. This is likely due to the numerous muscles involved and the common belief this motion mimics a flip turn (despite contradictory research). However, the effect the depth and load on the squat are unknown. Muscle force is hard to measure, therefore motion analysis techniques combined with the equations to solve for …
Body position is deemed an important variable for swimming success. However, body position is typically regarded as a static position in freestyle, despite noticeable undulation during the swims of many elite middle-distance swimmers. Perhaps more importantly, external work depends on changes in the position and velocity of the center of mass (CM), which is typically expressed as the intracycle velocity variation …