Recent articles featuring Counsilman Center Research on Swimming

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/fashion/21fitness.html

Aging swimmer gives hope for the rest of us
41-year-old Dara Torres partly reflects advances in training, experts say

CHICAGO - Dara Torres jokes that she had trouble reading the scoreboard after winning the first of two events at the Olympic swimming trials.
Her eyes just might be the only part of her body showing some age.
At 41, Torres is heading for her fifth Olympics — despite taking several years off, giving birth just two years ago and undergoing two surgeries within the past eight months.

Her remarkable feat has left armchair athletes doing a double-take. But exercise experts say Torres' success at least partly reflects advances in training — and that many of us could come closer to similar achievements than we think.

True, genetic makeup certainly has helped Torres compete at an elite level so relatively late in life. As Dr. Kathy Weber, director of women's sports medicine at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, puts it, she has the right "protoplasm."

She also has three other key advantages — opportunity, motivation and incentive to train hard, said exercise physiologist Joel Stager, who directs a science of swimming program at Indiana University.

And those things aren't impossible to achieve, as Torres has demonstrated.
"It shows us what we can do," Stager said. "It's just that most of us don't."

Torres qualified for the Olympics by beating swimmers nearly half her age in the 100-meter freestyle Friday, then set an American record Sunday in the 50-meter freestyle trials.
Lots of resistance trainingMost of the other swimmers on the U.S. women's team were born after Torres first competed in the Olympics, at the Los Angeles Games of 1984. The youngest, Elizabeth Beisel, was born shortly after the Barcelona Games of 1992, Torres' third Olympics.
Torres' regimen includes lots of resistance training — repetitive exercises using external force to push against muscles to make them stronger and increase their endurance.

This includes weight machines, free weights, and the type of simple floor exercises Torres does several times weekly: Lying on her back, she lifts and stretches each leg while also pushing against it with her arm.

These exercises also work to strengthen "core" muscles in the abdomen and back, which gives arms and legs "a better platform to work from," said Carl Foster, former president of the American College of Sports Medicine.

Core exercises are a relatively recent trend in sports medicine, reflecting a better understanding of how to improve training to prevent injury, said Foster, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in LaCrosse.

Improving performance after 40For athletes at any level, a gradual decline in endurance and speed occurs in the 30s and 40s, roughly half a percent a year, Stager said. And even that's with continued training.

While it would be virtually impossible for novice athletes to start rigorous training in their 30s and expect to reach Olympic level by their 40s, healthy people can significantly improve their athletic performance with the kinds of exercises Torres does, doctors say.

The key is to avoid overtraining, and to take time to warm up and cool down, Weber said.
Torres' training has helped her fight the typical slow decline in muscle mass that usually begins in the 30s, and given her sculpted arms and rock-hard abs that would make any 20-year-old jealous.

Dr. Andrew Gregory, a Vanderbilt University sports medicine specialist, noted her appearance has prompted doping speculation in some circles. Tests against some drugs aren't foolproof, so Torres' record of negative tests and strong denials won't be enough for some people. Nor will her offer to take a lie detector test.

But she has been a great swimmer for so long that doping seems more unlikely than for many athletes, said Dr. Walter Lowe, sports medicine director at the Baylor College of Medicine.
Torres has retired twice from competitive swimming, gave birth in 2006, and was briefly sidelined by shoulder and knee operations, early this year and in late 2007.

While other people might view these as good excuses for slowing down, doctors say it's not surprising Torres was able to bounce back quickly, given her years of training.

Stager said he has worked with Masters swimming, a national competitive program for amateur adult swimmers of all ages. Participants typically swim nearly every day of the week, and often look decades younger than their years, he said.

Torres "is a benchmark" for that kind of dedication, and she shows that devotion to exercise can help redefine aging, Stager said.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


From YubaNet.com
LifeHigh-tech Swimsuits: Hype Or Expensive Performance Enhancers?
Author: Indiana UniversityPublished on Aug 8, 2008 - 8:42:13 AM

Aug. 7, 2008 - For Olympic champions, their swim times boil down to years of dedication, hard work and sacrifice. For exercise physiologists and swimming experts at Indiana University, it's a matter of statistics.These researchers can successfully predict winning swim times based on previous years' performances, drawing attention to when anything other than chance -- such as doping or high technology swim suits -- gives athletes a boost.

Eight years ago, when the first generation of bodysuits was introduced prior to the Olympics, swim time predictions by researchers at IU's Counsilman Center for the Science of Swimming were so accurate that researchers concluded the suits had no impact on swim times. In Beijing, it could be a different story. At the U.S. trials in June, Counsilman Center researchers called all but two of the women's individual races but accurately predicted only one of the men's races."The men swam faster than expected," said Joel Stager, director of the Counsilman Center and a professor of exercise physiology. "Something not taken into account in previous races contributed to the performances."

If the high-tech swimsuits alter buoyancy, it would make a bigger impact with men because women generally are more buoyant, he said. Or, because men swim faster than women, the effect of lowering drag might also be more obvious.Stager said the majority of the swim coaching community is in favor of banning high-tech swim suits in age-group competition. The swimsuits' high cost raises equity issues, places an extra financial burden on athletes and swimming programs (swimming is not a revenue-generating sport) and could represent a major change to the sport -- and one introduced by business interests. Stager notes that Olympians do not pay for their suits."The issue is half a million swimmers feeling forced into purchasing $500-plus swimsuits in order to be competitive," said Stager, a coach and United States Masters Swimming champion. "Everything is based on impression."Stager said athletes report the new bodysuits last for only six to eight races."If all athletes are wearing these new suits, then what's the point?" Stager said. "All we have done is artificially elevate performances across the board. The new suits are only effective if only 'some' athletes have access to them."

International rules that govern swimming prohibit the use of equipment (or rather, "devices") that improves performance or increases buoyancy, which is why swimmers do not compete using such training devices as fins, paddles or neoprene wet suits. Since Speedo introduced its new LZR bodysuit earlier this year, dozens of world records have been set. Normally, around 10 world records are set in a given year.*

Over time, swim times improve in smaller increments as swimmers approach a theoretical limit to human performance. The top eight swimmers in the men's 50-meter freestyle in the 2004 Olympics, for example, swam .08 seconds faster than their peers in the 2000 Olympics. This represents a .3 percent improvement. The mere nature of water also makes incremental improvements more challenging. The IU researchers say resistive forces caused by the water increase exponentially with an increase in swim speed. Thus, to swim a little faster (at high speeds) becomes more difficult because propulsive forces must increase exponentially to mirror the exponential increase in resistive forces of the water. "If the suits make a 10 percent, or even a 2 percent difference, as predicted by the manufacturer, it's phenomenally fast when compared to annual improvements of much less than 1 percent," Stager said. "What this forces you to do is to start asking, how fast would Mark Spitz have gone in 1972, how fast would Jim Montgomery have gone in 1976, if they would have had one of these suits? It places all the previous records sort of out of context."

© Copyright YubaNet.com


The Lycra Swimsuit That's Worth Its Weight in Gold
A first-hand test of the tech that revolutionized swimming.
published online June 17, 2008


discover_maga7:http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jun/17-the-lycra-swimsuit-thats-worth-its-weight-in-gold


On a Saturday at 7 a.m. at a gym in Briarcliff Manor, New York, Henry Donahue, DISCOVER’s CEO and a recreational triathlete, was struggling to suit up for his regular swim. Although the Tracer Light—TYR’s new swimwear for the 2008 Beijing Olympics—screamed “speed” in sleek brown and green lines, Donahue was taking more than a little time squeezing himself into it.
After some help with zipping his shoulders into the skintight, shoulder-to-ankle racing suit, Donahue walked to the pool looking like a capeless superhero—or a guy in a sleeveless, lightweight wet suit. “I don’t think it’s that cold in there,” the lifeguard said.

Cold is not the enemy. Drag is. Tracer Light’s tight fit is intended to rein in body parts such as breasts and buttocks that wobble in the water and increase resistance. “Nothing is wiggling,” Donahue confirmed. TYR says the girdlelike garment streamlines the swimmer better than a full-body shave.

Athletes sometimes compress their bodies during a workout to decrease recovery time, but TYR’s secondary goal (after undulation elimination) is to “maximize oxygenation…for optimum performance.” How exactly does squeezing make you swim faster? I asked physiologist Joel Stager, who studies oxygen transport during exercise and directs the Counsilman Center for the Science of Swimming at Indiana University at Bloomington. He couldn’t give a direct answer, although he had done a bit of research. “When I started asking around about this, nobody had ever heard of it. I called up a guy who had just finished a textbook on muscle physiology and the guy was like, ‘What?’” Stager said. “Show me the data!”

OK, our weekend trial won’t give Stager the science he’s looking for, but Donahue does take product testing seriously. He got up at the same time and ate the same breakfast as he had for his baseline test the previous weekend. He couldn’t wait to blow himself out of the water. I stood by with a Timex Ironman stopwatch as Donahue jumped into the pool to start his warm-up.
A length or two in, he said it felt like he was floating higher than normal—and if he’s right, something’s wrong. Suits that enhance buoyancy are forbidden in swimming competition by the Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA), the same spoilsports who banned streamlined helmets and webbed gloves. The new “performance” wear—both the Tracer Light ($80 to $320) and Speedo’s offering in the category, the LZR Racer ($290 to $550)—did receive FINA approval, though the uproar surrounding some recently broken world records may make the regulators change their minds (or their procedures).

TYR and Speedo have to be careful about the claims they make: They say the suits reduce drag, and they hope buyers will take that to mean faster times. Between measuring frictional properties of potential fabrics in NASA wind tunnels and modeling the fluid dynamics of jiggling flesh, the manufacturers have definitely created some hydrodynamic suits. They just don’t test them for racing speed.

It is certainly possible that swimsuit science could shave off a fraction of a second, the margin by which high-level races are won. Donahue’s gains, however, were not so subtle. When he touched the wall at the end of his sprints, our positive thinker had dropped a full 15 seconds from his 400 and 6.4 seconds from his 100. A recent study found that expensive placebos work better than identical cheap ones. Looks like when it comes to psyching yourself up with swimwear, you get what you pay for.

– DISCOVER reporter Jennifer Barone


Aiming for the Olympics, Regardless of Age
July 03, 2008 01:27 PM ET
Katherine Hobson Permanent Link

I recently wrote a friend that if I never beat my personal best time in an Ironman triathlon, set in 2005, I'll be fine with it. But after reading in the New York Times Magazine about Dara Torres, the 41-year-old swimmer who this week is competing to go to her fifth Olympic Games, I'm thinking I shouldn't give up on my 36-year-old self quite yet. Torres has a superb chance of making the team and winning a medal in Beijing. And she's not even the oldest athlete at the Olympic swimming trials; Susan von der Lippe is 42. At the track and field trials, pole vaulter Jeff Hartwig has already made the Olympic team, at 40. I called Indiana University kinesiologist Joel Stager, who was quoted in the NYT Magazine article, to chat more about the issue of age and performance. (He knows of which he speaks; the 55-year-old swimmer is the fastest 50- and 100-meter freestyler age 55 to 59 in the United States. With his 100-meter time of about a minute flat, he regularly beats high schoolers.)

What physical changes affect athletic performance as someone ages?

When you compare [older folks] to people who are inactive, they look the same: a gradual loss of muscle mass and a loss of central nervous system activity. But the things we used to think were aging-related may be more related to that lack of activity [that occurs as most of us age]. I don't know that we have the answers to what happens when someone maintains a high level of activity; Dara is running the experiment for us. People tend to curtail their activity as they age, a phenomenon called hypokinesis.

Is that a natural progression?

Researchers have done this with mice and logged their activity on wheels, and basically that showed us that as the animals got older, their activity minutes declined over time. Humans fortunately have the ability to override that. The average participation in U.S. Masters Swimming [the governing body for adult swimmers] is 17½ years. And on the average, masters swimmers train four to five days a week. So what we can talk about in exercise physiology is volitional activity: We can get up off the couch and go run.

Is the usual slowdown necessary?

I don't think so. My grandfather was still farming at age 80. But in today's world, it may be unusual. Hypokinesis may be a natural phenomenon, but we have control over it.

And what about performing at an incredibly high level, like Torres?

She has the opportunity, the incentive, and the motivation. It's absolutely terrific. But we don't have a lot of people who have maintained their activity patterns and training as they did in their 20s. She took many years off before coming back.

Is that kind of a break advisable?

I'd rather see someone be consistent and persistent than skip a week or take a year off. I can make an excuse every day for why I don't want to get in the water, but I tell myself that I can just do 1,000 yards because tomorrow I may not be able to get to the pool. And exercise does other things: helps mood issues, improves blood pressure, and, needless to say, burns calories.
Torres is a sprinter.

But aren't older athletes supposed to be better at endurance events?

It's a little confusing. There are some physiological variables that tend to favor endurance, like changes to muscle mass that may encourage endurance rather than power. But the other side of the coin is that as a sprinter she can get away with less training [in the pool] and do other exercises that benefit her performance. The other thing is that she's not putting a lot of pressure on her ankles, knees, hips and spine; you're not working against gravity when you're swimming.

How does training have to change as one gets older?

I can't train at the same load as I did 20 years ago. What becomes really hard is the recovery. A lot of the older athletes find out that when you go beyond a certain training load, it's pretty hard to go on with the rest of your day. Difficult workouts are catabolic—they break down the body—and provoke an immunological response. Recovery from one can take not hours but days.

What else can older athletes do?

Pay attention to nutrition and make intelligent decisions to aid recovery. Getting out of the pool and grabbing a diet soda is probably not the best thing to do. But old muscle responds the same way that young muscle does to physical training. The point is, you have to do it.

There you have it from Dr. Stager.



Chocolate Milk Does a Body Good
Published June 9, 2008

Chocolate milk is just about the best thing an endurance athlete can drink after a hard workout.
Forget the fancy packaging and multi-syllabic scientific terms that are used to describe the nutrition benefits of expensive powders, gels, and other liquid concoctions found at General Nutrition Stores. Muscle Milk and its similar-marketed cousins of the “endurance fuel” family have nothing on moo milk and Hershey’s syrup. Seriously.

With the increasing demand and use of protein and carbohydrate drinks aimed at the hard-core athlete, the New York Times published comments from an un-scientific taste and performance test of leading post-activity sports drinks designed to optimize recovery. In “Gear Test: How About a Spin and Tonic?“, Gatorade Protein Recovery Shake, Met-Rx RTD, EAS Myoplex Read-to-Drink, Powerbar Recovery, and Cytopsorts Recovery Drink were sampled.

I could not help but notice how expensive all these drinks were. And the image of chugging any of these drinks after a workout brought to mind a picture of a mechanic topping-off the fluids in a race car after a hard drive. It seems as if the marketing of these products appeal to an idea in our head of our bodies as machines that need to be re-fueled with fancy chains of lab-designed amino acids, carbs, and proteins.

Then I remembered of hearing an anecdote that Michael Phelps drinks Carnation Instant Breakfast between races. For Michael Jordan, “It’s gotta’ be the shoes!” For this Michael, maybe, “It’s gotta be the milk!”

In 2006, the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism published a study conducted at Indiana University that found:

Chocolate milk contains an optimal carbohydrate to protein ratio, which is critical for helping refuel tired muscles after strenuous exercise and can enable athletes to exercise at a high intensity during subsequent workouts. It is a strong alternative to other commercial sports drinks in helping athletes recover from strenuous, energy-depleting exercise. (Source.)
How effective? Co-author Joel Stager says, “Chocolate milk was nearly twice as effective than the synthetic products [such as those taste-tested by the NYT] as a recovery product.”

“The researchers found that cyclists who drank chocolate milk during the rest period were able to bike nearly twice as long before reaching exhaustion than those who consumed the carbohydrate replacement drink.”

Bonus: “And the athletes liked the taste a lot better.”
Double bonus: Chocolate milk is relatively inexpensive, especially when compared to the $3-4 cost of a single-serving of Muscle Milk.

What is so great about chocolate milk? And what about that sugar? That can’t be good for you, can it? Well…
Chocolate milk has the ideal ratio of carbohydrates to proteins — 3 or 4 grams of carbs to 1 gram of protein — for optimal post-exercise recovery. Regular milk does not have this same ratio.
It’s not just the ratio of carbohydrates to proteins that makes a difference. There seems to be something special about milk itself that cannot be replicated in the lab. “Endurox, which has the same carb-to-protein ratio as chocolate milk, fared poorly” in the study.

What gives? One researcher supposes that “It may have to do with the different composition of the sugars in the milk. The sugars in the milk may be better absorbed in the gut than those in the Endurox.”

Whatever the reason, Mother Nature and Hershey’s know what’s best. Pass me some milk and chocolate syrup!