Symposium Science in Swimming 2022

The 2nd Science in Swimming Symposium took place at the University of Kassel from 20 to 21 September 2022. The symposium was organized by the Department of Training and Exercise Science of the Institute of Sport and Sport Science in cooperation with the German Swimming Association. The aim of the symposium was to bring science and practice closer together. To this end, six presentations were given by national and international speakers on the topic of race analysis in swimming, followed by plenty of room for discussion and personal conversations. The symposium opened with a presentation by national coach for junior athletes Carsten Gooßes. In his presentation, he analyzed the competitive performances of German junior swimmers before and after the start of the pandemic in an international comparison. He was able to show that the pandemic has had a significant impact on both performance and participation in competitions. Tomohiro Gonjo from Bournemouth University then presented limitations and tips for the evaluation and interpretation of race analyses with data from competitions and out-of-competition experiments. In his presentation, Santiago Veiga from the Technical University of Madrid focused on the underwater phases of swimming races. He was able to show how important these phases are for race success and how top swimmers differ from non-top swimmers and medal winners from non-medal winners. One of his take-home messages was that longer underwater phases should be built in at the junior level in order to get used to apnea situations early and carefully.

The topic of relay swimming took up more space at this event. Joachim Hüffmeier, professor of psychology at TU Dortmund University, spoke about various sources of motivation in swimming relay teams. He was able to show that relay swimmers make a greater effort and therefore swim faster than in comparable individual races. The decisive factor here is the position in which they complete their part of the course, whether the team has a chance of winning a medal and whether they are among the stronger or weaker team members. The organizers of the symposium, Claudia Braun and Sebastian Fischer from the University of Kassel, then used race analysis findings to show how relay swimmers swim faster from a movement science perspective and gave initial cautious recommendations for swimming relay teams with regard to the influencing factors of gender and performance. The symposium concluded with a Zoom conference with the National Technical Advisor of the French Swimming Federation (FFN), whose lecture the participants had heard as a video presentation the day before. Robin Pla spoke about the various building blocks for optimizing the performance of the French national team in preparation for the 2024 Olympic Games in his own country. In the Zoom conference, Robin Pla was asked questions about his presentation, which the almost 70 participants had developed and prioritized together in a working phase the evening before. It is planned to establish this symposium in the future and to hold it regularly at different locations in order to continue bridging the gap between science and practice.