Physics Of Swimming

Swimming is one of the most traditional competitive sports in the world. As a formalized sport, swimming features in a range of local, national and international competitions, including featuring in every modern summer Olympic Games. With the development of modern technology development, swimming has been pushed to a new height. In fact, with the world record breaking over and over again, scientific evidence has indicated that we might have been very close to the physical limits of the human body. That means the world record will be harder and harder to be broken so that it left the athletes bigger challenges. Luckily, scientific technology improvements help athletes to reach the maximum level of their body. An American swimsuits manufacturer

Diagram #1 shows the force analyzing diagram of a athlete. As we can see, there are mainly four forces forcing on the athlete — buoyancy force, the force of gravity, thrust force and the water friction. The buoyancy force up is equal to the force of gravity, so the athlete is still vertically. What really affects the result of the competition is the horizontal forces. Scientifically, the athlete can move forward in the water is because the thrust force his body offers is greater than the water friction. So if the water friction is reduced, the athlete can reach a greater speed with the same thrust force. As the thrust force depends on the physical conditions of the athlete, the only way which can help the athlete improve the score is to reduce the water friction. This is how LZR Racer swim outfit works — to reduce the water friction. Speedo LZR Racer has been tested to be able to reduce 5%-10% less passive water friction, compared to the previous generation of Speedo’s product. This 10% less friction matters a lot. With the previous product, 21 swimmers had broke the world record since 2007, so we can estimate that how helpful 10% reduced friction based on that product would be for swimmers. The LZR

There are around 600,000 competitive swimmers nationwide in the USA while this swimming community has not benefited financially from the new technology. Although swimmers as famous as Michael Phelps may never worry about the swimsuits fee, most simple swimming competitors do care about that cost. The LZR Racer can cost up to $580 while the traditional one only cost $20. What even further strains that shortage is the bad endurance of swimsuits. In order to get the best conditions, competitive swimmers typically purchase one swimsuit for the season and then a second one for championships. That means one competitors needs at least two pack of new swimsuits per year. As the swimsuits’ technology becomes higher, the costs also rise up. For example, a championship round of suits could cost a high school swimming program around $20,000, which is how much all swimmers combined had spent at Indiana state championships prior to these new costly suits. Now, Indiana swimmers will spend a combined $100,000 on swimsuits for the state meet. College swimming programs have felt the pinch, too.(Stager, 2009) Therefore, a big conflict appears — more competitive swimsuits or acceptable price? In order to avoid any competitiveness lost, swimmers compromised. Schools, colleges and swimming teams have to pay the huge amount of money to buy the high-technology