Swimmer's Daily

  • Hall of Fame swimmer and 3-time Olympic gold medalist Rowdy Gaines joins the show! We talk about how COVID is affecting student-athletes who have trained their entire lives to play a sport only to now be sidelined and/or lose out on scholarships? We address the financial, professional and mental health repercussions, as well as the long-term effects on sports in general. We also get into the delayed 2020 (now 2021) Olympics and what they might look like next year, with reference to him being unable to compete in the 1980 Moscow Olympics because of the U.S. boycott.

    Additionally, Rowdy is head of community engagement for USA Swimming, and talks about the Aquatics Coalition they’ve launched to advocate for pools to remain open during the pandemic, arguing they are safe to use, and a necessary resource for swimming lessons and rehabilitation, particularly in low-income areas.

  • If you can’t make it to the pool then you are in for a treat. This complete routine is designed specifically for swimmers and adaptable for everybody. By the end of it, you’re going to be well on your way to improving your sports performance, burning calories, and carving a well-proportioned body.

    With this routine your covering twenty exercises full of strength-building movements, followed by dynamic core movements, and completed with full-body athletic movements.

  • Here are 5 of the most important stretches for anyone who wants to recover from, or prevent common swimming-related injuries. From what I find clinically, these 5 stretches help rectify some of the most common underlying issues that set our tissue up to fail when swimming. Whether it be neck pain, shoulder pain, back pain, hip pain, and even knee pain, there are common dysfunctional themes that connect many of these issues. So if you’re trying to figure out why your aches, pains, or injuries just aren’t settling, or you’d like to just improve your swimming performance give these 5 stretches a go!

  • Terry Varney Freerks helped paved the way for hundreds of swimmers over the years. But she sees sport as a vehicle for education and other opportunities in life. She began swimming at the age of four and became a nationally-ranked swimmer by the age of ten. Her career continued into college where she had to stop competitive swimming and take another route when moving home and attending the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She began coaching for her former swim club, the CSP Tideriders, and quickly moved up the ranks eventually becoming Executive Director. Her career in the water coincided with her education outside of it. She got her masters and Ph.D. in counseling. We follow her career and how she has helped hundreds reach their goals.

  • The blue whale might be one of the most enigmatic creatures on the planet, but the true megastars of the diving world are Cuvier’s beaked whales (Ziphius cavirostris). They are capable of reaching depths of almost 3000 m, and calculations suggest that these relatively diminutive whales should only remain submerged for about 33 minutes before their oxygen is depleted and they resort to anaerobic respiration. Yet experience told Nicola Quick and colleagues from Duke University that the shy mammals were capable of diving for far longer. Wondering how often the animals embark on these epic dives and how long it takes them to recover after returning to the surface, William Cioffi, Jeanne Shearer, Andrew Read, Daniel Webster (from the Cascadia Research Collective) and Quick went in search of the elusive animals in the abundant waters off Cape Hatteras, U.S.

    “Because the animals spend so little time at the surface, we needed calm seas and experienced observers to look for them,” says Quick. “The average period they spend at the surface is about two minutes, so getting a tag on takes a dedicated crew and a maneuverable vessel.” The brief surfacing periods also limited the amount of time available to transfer the precious information to a satellite each time the animals returned from a dive.

    Deploying 23 tags over a five-year period, the team recorded more than 3600 foraging dives, ranging from 33 minutes to two hours 13 min, all of which were well in excess of the point when diving Cuvier’s beaked whales were thought to run out of oxygen. Knowing that approximately 95% of the dives performed by other mammals are complete before their oxygen supplies dwindle, the team rechecked their plot and realized that if the same proportion of Cuvier’s beaked whale dives are completed before their oxygen stores expire, then they could remain submerged for an incredible 77.7 minutes before resorting to anaerobic respiration. “It really did surprise us that these animals are able to go so far beyond what predictions suggest their diving limits should be,” says Quick.

    In addition, the team picked up two extraordinary dives in 2017, which exceeded even their wildest dreams. One was almost three hours long, while the other lasted three hours 42 minutes. “We didn’t believe it at first; these are mammals after all, and any mammal spending that long under water just seemed incredible,” says Quick, publishing the discovery in Journal of Experimental Biology.

    Read Phys.org
    https://youtu.be/h3CudVs0tVw

  • Don’t miss out this amazing Women’s 100m Backstroke Final from the 2007 FINA World Championships in Melbourne! Record holder and Olympic Champion Natalie Coughlin was very motivated to win a Gold Medal being the favourite at the starting blocks. With a terrific performance the American star beat all the contenders breaking her own World Record set in 2002 with a time of 59.44!

  • During the 1980s, Canadian swim titans Alex Baumann and Victor Davis ruled the pool.

    Baumann was a quiet, analytical IM and freestyle specialist who would win two gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, while Davis, a fiery and brash world-record-breaking breaststroker, had his life tragically cut short when he was hit by a car a year after winning gold in the 200-meter breaststroke in Los Angeles.

    The Fast and The Furious is a swimming documentary made by the Canadian Broadcasting Company that follows the training and achievements of the two Canadian swimmers as they navigate injuries, conflicts with their coaches, and international competition.

    A must-watch swimming documentary for swim fans, swimmers, coaches, and parents alike.

  • The Paris 2024 organising committee has made further revisions to its construction plans, announcing that it will no longer build two temporary venues as part of a suite of cost control measures to ensure the French city delivers the Olympic Games within its initial €3.8bn ($4.5bn/£3.5bn) budget.

    Paris had originally planned to build a permanent 15,000-seat aquatics centre next to the Stade de France in the Saint-Denis region of the city. However,  in June 2018 it was announced that the aquatics competition would instead take place at a temporary 15,000-seat arena with water polo and diving staged at a smaller 5,000-capacity permanent facility next to the stadium.

    The scaled back plans came in response to concerns expressed by the French government’s financial inspectors that they were facing a potential overspend of up to €500m.

    But now these plans have been scaled back even further, with the city revealing that it will no longer build the temporary aquatics arena either. A temporary venue in the Le Bourget region of Paris that was scheduled to host volleyball events has also been scrapped.

    The swimming and water polo finals will now be held at the existing Paris La Défense arena, while the volleyball will also take place in an existing venue, which has yet to be announced.

    Read SportBusiness

  • USA’s Jordan Wilimovsky, Gold medallist at the 2015 FINA World Championships in Kazan, takes us through some of the insights of Open Water Swimming.