Swimming on the web

FloSwimming

Keeping with the video theme another site I like to visit regularly is floswimming.org. From what I can tell floswimming was started by a couple guys with a video camera, a laptop, and a passion for the sport of swimming that drive all over the USA going to meets and universities and swim clubs interviewing swimmers and coaches. There are also some blogs on the site, and a community site for swimmers that I haven't looked at closely.

While the site is largely about swimming in the USA I find that a lot of the content transcends nationality, swimming is swimming no matter where it is practiced. For example this interview with Genadijus Sokolovas covers the role of strength and strength training in swimming. You can find a list of people they have interviewed under the video tab in the speakers link.

Floswimming covered the United States Masters Swimming SCY Nationals and their coverage includes 18 interviews and 240 races! Some of the interviews are really good, for example, check out this interview with Rich Abrahams (I think of hims as the American equivalent of our Ian Smith!). I think there is a lot of truth to his observation that Masters often swim too fast when they are supposed to be swimming slow and swimming too slow when they are supposed to be swimming fast.

Also check out the Weekly Wednesday Workout section to see video of various clubs and teams working out. An example video is one showing the use of buckets and pulleys for resistance training.

When USA Swimming entered a partnership in swimnetwork.com they cut off floswimming's permission to video the actual races at their big meets, which I think is a big shame, especially since they don't offer video of the swims themselves. But floswimming is often still there doing interviews. See the coverage section. And they still cover college and ymca and masters meets. I think it would be great if someone in Canada got equally passionate about swimming and set up a Canadian equivalent to floswimming, it would be cool if Canadian swimmers got this type of exposure.

Posted at 12:12AM Aug 01, 2008 by Lindsay in General  |  Comments[0]