Elitetrack: Sport Training & Conditioning

Here's a thought provoking article from the Washington Post's Paul Farhi:World records fell like the Amazon rain at the World Swimming Championships that ended last Sunday in Australia. Led by the indomitable Michael Phelps, who set five records, swimmers in Melbourne cruised to the best times ever in 11 events.  It's a remarkable outburst of history-making performances, but the fac
 
Continue reading…

maybe swimmers are just staring to  figure out what steroids are  :bouncy:

I think you are finally getting more athletic people to do the sport. I know at a lot of high schools the swimmers are generally unathletic, but the athletic people that do it are great a lot of times. The guys who have the sprint swim records at my old high school (and were state champs) happened to be the brothers of the 200/400m record holder (21.4 and 47.6) at my high school. Kind of funny how that works.

The funny thing about that article is I was literally in the process of writing a near-duplicate content blog entry on the very same subject when I saw that one.

As for why we're seeing the records, I don't think it's drug related at all. Swimming has as deep a drug history as track. I think the frequency of records is talent related along with improvements in sport technology (improved swim suits, pools, lane lines, etc.), training methods (swim training was VERY old school until recently), and techniques (several techniques have come along over the past 20 years in swimming which directly lead to WRs).