Breathing while swimming is one of the very important factors for swimming skills. Well-trained swimmers lift their faces to inspire air for as short a time as possible. To shorten breathing time, they exhale while their faces are still under water. They perform these motions, together with other leg and arm motions, unconsciously. This is the most skillful point of swimming for breathing near the water surface. Our main purpose of this research is clarifying the mechanisms of breath control while swimming. We developed a system to measure nasal pressure in water. This protocol can be useful to measure breathing time while swimming in the flume. The healthy male subjects were swimming the breast stroke with pressure sensors attached to their noses at three different speeds(0.8, 1.0, 1.2m/sec). We measured the exhaling time in one cycle of breathing. Average times were 2.50, 1.98 and 1.56 seconds for each speed, the exhaling time getting shorter and shorter as swimming speed increased. On the other hand, the ratio of exhalation time to one cycle of breathing was not changed with swimming speed. Humans synchronize their exhalation while swimming with other stroke movements, but this synchronization is not affected only by swimming speed because the ratio of exhalation time does not correlate with swimming speed. The nasal pressure did not change with swimming speed either. We also found from the pressure curves that well-trained swimmers exhaled strongly at the end of the exhalation before they raised their faces from the water surface.
© Copyright 1999 5th IOC World Congress on Sport Sciences with the Annual Conference of Science and Medicine in Sport 1999. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.