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