Is Fitness The Key To Swimming Faster? Are You Sure?

Courtesy: Bob Prichard

The preponderance of modern swim training is improving fitness. Sure, there is a dollop on technique, but since the prevailing sentiment is that everyone has their own technique, why spend a lot of time on it?

Here is the idea. Swimming a ton of yardage will stimulate your heart to grow bigger (like any other muscle), it will squirt out more blood with each beat, that bigger squirt will carry more oxygen to your muscles, you won’t tire out so fast and you will swim faster. Along the way, your capillary bed with grow, improving the delivery of oxygen to your frazzled muscles.

It’s easy to measure your fitness. Just get a VO2max test. If you are really ‘fit’, you will be in the 70-90 category, or ‘world-class’.

Seems simple enough. After all, everyone has had the experience of falling behind on the last leg because they ‘ran out of gas’.

But is it that simple?

Let’s take Janet Evans as an example. Janet simultaneously held World Records in the 400, 800- and 1500-meter freestyle. Some of her records lasted 19 years. Janet must have been a VO2max beast.

Wrong.

Janet had a VO2max of only 56. How low is that? Well, a couch potato has a VO2max of 46. Her competitors were in the 70-80 group. In other words, Janet was closer to being a couch potato than a ‘world-class’ swimmer.

But she was world-class. In fact, she was the best for 18-19 years.

Was it her stroke? Was it much more efficient than anyone else’s?

It wasn’t. It was just ‘average’. She did have an unusual over the water recovery stroke, but underwater her stroke was average according to her hand force output curve.

So—what did coaches and swim scientists do? Did they put her under a microscope to see why she was so much faster than anyone else with such a low VO2max?

No. They just continued increasing yardage by distance or intensity. Oh yes. They also added in weightlifting.

But I have a habit of investigating highly successful athletes, so I flew down to Southern California where she was competing in a meet and asked her if I could measure her flexibility. It sounds unusual, but I have done this with dozens of elite athletes in many sports.

Janet had average flexibility in her legs, hips and shoulders. When I say average, I mean for elite swimmers.

But there were three areas where she had 50% more flexibility.

Her breathing ranges.

I measure breathing ranges in a three-step process that compensates for athlete size so I can compare a five-year-old age group swimmer with a 6’8” goliath.

First, I measure the circumference of the stomach (at the belly button), the diaphragm (the top of the costal arch) and the chest (nipple line for men, just below the breasts for women).

Then I have them blow out all their air, ask them to take a deep breath (expanding all three areas) and measure the amount of expansion. I then divide the amount of each expansion by its circumference to get their breathing range.

Janet’s breathing ranges were all 16%. This means that someone with a 36” chest expands 5.76”.

Her competition? The many I have measured were all 10-12%.

So, does this mean anything? It does. When I doubled the chest expansion of one of my athletes from 2” to 4”, his lung capacity increased 33%, from 3.22 liters to 4.3 liters.

Do you think you might be able to swim faster if your chest expanded 50-100% more than your competitors?

Another swimmer I measured did. He was a national record holder in the 100-meter freestyle. He had the biggest amount of expansion I have ever measured. His chest was 45” and expanded 9”, or 20%. I asked him if he ever got tired during a race. He looked puzzled. ‘Why would I get tired? It was only 100 meters’ was his response.

Age group swimmers in my swim camps have improved their times up to 18% after just one week of stroke improvement and chest expansion. The most surprising thing? Following up with their parents six months later I found that their grade point average had improved a full letter grade. One gal went from a C+ average to a B+ average, with an A- in physics!

Now, you are probably thinking that 20% chest expansion is something you are born with and have for the rest of your life.

Not true. 20% is something you are born with, but most people lose.

The kids entering my swim camps in 2000 all had less chest expansion than before. I had never seen an across-the-board drop like this in the 15 years I had been running these camps. As I was releasing the microfibers (mild scar tissue) that were restricting their chest expansion, they recalled the stress that tightened up their chests.

Their school backpack.

I was dumbfounded. How could a school backpack permanently reduce chest expansion and lung capacity? So, I did some research. First, I found out that larger and heavier backpacks became common in the mid-90’s as schools required more and more books and supplies be carried to school every day. Then I found 8 studies from around the world that measured a reduction in lung capacity when kids put on their school backpack. The reduction was measurable when the backpack weighed only 5% of body weight (no one carries a load that light) and climbed to a 40% reduction when the weight was increased. A survey by the US Department of Education found a 40% drop in freshmen STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) majors between 1996 and 2004. In 1996, college freshmen had been carrying bigger, heavier backpacks for 1 year. In 2004, they had been carrying them for 8 years.

Did these kids swim faster after we undid the damage from their backpacks? Of course they did. Did their grades improve? Yes, they did.

But there are other ways to lose your 20% expansion. Chronic colds and allergies, asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia—especially when you are young—can permanently cut chest expansion in half. Sports impacts like trapping a soccer ball with your chest, getting tackled or elbowed in the chest, falling on a football, a car accident or bike fall, texting, playing video games, vaping and emotional or mental stress. In reaction to all these stresses we tighten our muscles and the connective tissue (which is not very bright) thinks we have cracked a rib and so starts to create microfibers to immobilize the area so it can heal. The problem then is two-fold. First, the connective tissue never figured out how to release those microfibers. Second, they tend to accumulate over time, gradually reducing flexibility. Chest, diaphragm and stomach expansion are lost by the ordinary happenings of life.

Oh yes. There are some other ways swimmers lose their breathing ranges (this is not going to make a lot of coaches very happy). Bench presses, push-ups, pull-ups, swim benches, hand paddles, pull buoys, sit-ups and ‘core’ work are other stresses our swimmers have recalled as we have released microfibers around their chest and stomach. They then took deeper breaths and swam faster.

So—what does all this mean?

Should you measure your breathing ranges? Should your whole team measure their breathing ranges? Should you stop doing things that reduce chest expansion and lung capacity?

No. I wouldn’t bother. It will just confuse everyone. They already have so much on their plate anyway.

The best thing is just to keep doing what you have always been doing. Maybe increase your yardage or weights just a little bit. Don’t do anything too different. After all, everyone knows the formula for success. Why mess with it?

ABOUT BOB PRICHARD

Bob Prichard is President of Somax Performance Institute in Tiburon, CA. His 18 Olympic swimmers have won 43 Gold Medals and set 11 World Records.  His age group and masters swimmers have won state, national and regional championships.  A former columnist for the New York Times, he has worked as an analyst for NBC Sports Olympics and has been cited in Sports Illustrated and Sport magazine among many others.

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Dan
3 years ago

Bob seems to be part of the ever growing area of private coaching or private lessons geared towards serious swimmers. The business model is pretty easy. First label yourself an expert and if needed pad your resume by claiming to have coached swimmers that in all reality you never really coached. I’ve always wondered why parents don’t flat out ask questions like “What team did you coach?” or “Which swimmers did you coach for an entire season or Olympic cycle?”. I’m sure there are some really good private coaches out there, but one would imagine most of the elite/expert coaches in the world are actually coaching teams or small groups of elite swimmers.

The true genius of this business is… Read more »

Smith-King-Dahlia-Manuel
Reply to  Dan
3 years ago

Seriously? If you are a female teenager with aspirations of collegiate swiimming, would you rather be coached by Gemmell/Parratto or Prichard while going completely broke in the process.

Harambe
3 years ago

I appreciate the thorough citations and evidence based nature of this article. I like how many (0) peer reviewed sources he uses

swifter
3 years ago

How about read it, or don’t. Use it, or don’t. Why the belligerence? He talks about flexibility and breathing range. Don’t like it? Don’t use it. But perhaps a short quick study of Yoga breathing techniques might reveal that breathing quality is not unimportant.

Also MD Also SwimDad
Reply to  swifter
3 years ago

This is a bad take. If the message was that yardage isn’t everything, consider some breathing techniques, most/all would get behind that. Instead, the message is that “chest expansion” is a magical metric, propped up by a dubious example from 30 years ago and other self-aggrandizing claims. Want to learn the recipe? Just sign up for his zillion dollar program. Your child will be faster, and smarter too! It stinks of profiteering via pseudoscience.

sven
Reply to  Also MD Also SwimDad
3 years ago

Exactly. The SwimSwam community doesn’t respond this way to every article. You could spot the tenuous science and desperate attempts to establish credibility from space. If this is the kind of reaction that his business model gets, it shows that there are serious flaws that need to be addressed.

Captain Ahab
3 years ago

Bob Prichard is correct. The first and most important thing before gaining mileage and speed is technique and form. Sometimes it’s important to slow down for a short period of time in order to have a coach or someone analysis and correct a stroke. Going slower can require the athlete to concentrate on the stroke harder as well. Assessments are used to make sure that people are the skills correctly. In some ways, a person has too often unlearned body positions and movements in order to learn better more efficient strokes. Those more efficient strokes conserve oxygen and energy and will later allow speed and distance. After the stroke is perfected or got the point where you want it then… Read more »

Ol' Longhorn
3 years ago

Well, you have to admit, his list of clients (http://somaxsports.com/clients.php) IS impressive. smh

Aquajosh
3 years ago

Interestingly enough, none of “his” gold medalists have a testimonial on the Somax page. If microfiber release truly had an impact on flexibility and athletic performance, don’t you think it would have proliferated in the past 20+ years he’s been touting these ridiculously expensive swim camps using examples of swimmers from the 96 Olympics who would probably take umbrage with his claims to their success?

Nordic
3 years ago

What is Swimswam´s role in relation to this? Is there no editorial quality control of the content being published by so called Contributors? This is disappointing as this site in so many ways provides a ton of interesting content for swimfans and where the people behind the site have outstanding background and a real heart for the sport. In my view this «article» unfortunately tarnishes the credibility of this otherwise exellent site.

phelps swims 200 breast rio
3 years ago

From Google, no results found for “swimming coach bob prichard”.

swimfan210_
Reply to  phelps swims 200 breast rio
3 years ago

Somax Performance Institute’s website claims that athletes from multiple sports (basketball, baseball, golf, running, soccer, swimming, tennis) have benefitted from their program. So I don’t think I can exactly call him a swim coach that way. And that statement on the website makes everything sound even more fake, because he doesn’t specialize in anything.

Smith-King-Dahlia-Manuel
Reply to  swimfan210_
3 years ago

Voodoo athletics.