Ryan Lochte stole the show at the 2010 Pan Pacific Swimming Championships. Six gold medals and he came within a few tenths of his world record in the 200 IM, with a Lycra suit on! It was a very impressive performance, indeed. So what was the difference? What enabled Ryan to have such a stellar meet? Nutrition.

Apparently Ryan has changed his eating habits and it shows. We heard he gave up eating a lot of junk food and it shows. Yes, he was lean and mean and fast. I didn’t speak to Ryan nor ask him about his nutrition, but here is what was reported.

In 2008, during the Beijing Olympics, Lochte was quoted in the NY Times on line with the following. “Nutrition’s probably the last thing I worry about,” Lochte said. “It’s probably my downfall. I’ve been eating McDonald’s almost every meal here.”

This year, at the Pan Pacs, Lochte tells The New York Times, “I haven’t really been eating fast food. Before, I always thought it didn’t really matter what you put in your body because you burn so many calories. What I’ve learned is it does make a difference.“

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Swimming in the years B.J. (before Jaked) supposedly wasn’t a sport of high interest. There seemed to be a lonely warrior, Michael Phelps, on a quest to bring swimming to the main stream and into the living rooms of millions of people. The road to his 8 gold medals at the 2008 Olympics certainly took swimming out of the 4 year shadow the sport was known for. But who would have thought that this would be just the start of swimming media mania? The so called “shiny suits” made their way into swimming and with them the world record line on television looked like a technical error by the broadcaster with oftentimes the full field ahead of it.

Swimming was nothing like we knew it B.J. anymore. Legends were taken down and the rate at which world records were broken was higher than any FINA staff member possibly could hold up with. Most WR probably never officially were one as the approval process took longer than another swimmer taking down the new standard once more. I wonder if they even cared to hand out the official certificate you’ll get for a WR. FINA’s administrative expenses must have tripled at least during the shiny suit era.

And of course selling suits that regularly ripped after a single use had to be more than just a great business to be in. Let’s face the truth, most of us were not sponsored by one of the suit manufacturers and the pressure to under perform or get beaten up at a meet wasn’t an option and the dollars bills ended up wrapped around our bodies in form of one of those shiny suits.

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In order to reduce the air bubbles behind your hand underwater, you must enter the hand delicately.

Many beginner swimmers are taught to enter the hand into the water just in front of their head and slide it underwater forward as the elbow extends. Or some are told to slow the hand down before it enters the water, kind of like one of those new toilet seats with the spring shock absorber on it. The reasons, I can only assume, are to try to reduce the number of air bubbles one gets when the hand pulls through the water.

Having a lot of air bubbles behind the hand reduces the amount of propulsive drag one can generate as the hand moves backward in the propulsive phase of the pull. And, if you haven’t already noticed, most of the great swimmers have little or no air and the not-so-great swimmers often have lots of air. Why?
Well, it doesn’t have to do with laying the hand in slowly or sliding it out from the head forward, because none of the great swimmers do that. In fact, quite the opposite, they move the arms/hands aggressively and quickly forward through the recovery, hurrying to get them back into the water again.

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