By Erin Kelley, MS, RD

Since the 1920s, vitamin D was thought to only be necessary for preventing rickets (a bone disease), but recently has become widely popular. In the last few years, scientists and health professionals got a wake-up call when learning that this long-forgotten vitamin had so many beneficial effects on health—ranging from cancer to diabetes to fighting the flu. Even the government officially raised its recommended daily intake levels in 2010, due to the attention and scientific support.

Roughly 75% of Americans have insufficient or deficient vitamin D levels. This is due in part to our modern lifestyle of wearing clothes, being indoors, and wearing sunblock. Athletes typically do not meet the required dietary intakes. Here’s a look at how vitamin D may affect athletes:

Vitamin D improves athletic performance

Vitamin D is produced in the body when exposed to UVB rays from the sun. Studies done decades ago in both Russia and Germany suggest that use of sunlamps (lamps which give off UVB rays, thereby producing vitamin D in the body) improved muscle strength in world-class athletes. In one of the studies, one group of sprinters was exposed to the sunlamps; the other group was not. Both underwent the same training for the 100-meter dash. Those without the sunlamps had low sprint times. The runners exposed to sunlamps actually improved their sprint time by 7.4 percent!
Another study testing vertical jumping ability done in 2009 showed that adolescent athletes with the lowest levels of vitamin D weren’t able to jump as high as those with higher blood levels. Finally, observational studies show athlete’s peak performance is in late summer, when they’ve had enough time to store vitamin D from the sun. Performance (measured by maximal oxygen uptake) tended to decline as the winter grew near—even though training remained the same.

Vitamin D improves muscle strength and recovery

Vitamin D helps muscle fibers to develop and grow normally, and it affects the size and number of fast-twitch muscle fibers. Research shows muscle strength improves when those who are deficient in vitamin D attain normal vitamin D levels.

What’s more, low vitamin D levels are associated with higher inflammation and inflammatory disease risk. Inflammation is a normal part of exercise and training—and as a result, compounds in the body called “cytokines” are produced. Vitamin D reduces cytokine production, thereby allowing the body to recover quicker between heavy training.

Vitamin D improves bone health

Vitamin D promotes calcium absorption and maintains bone mineral density—in other words, it keeps bones strong. Strong bones mean less risk for developing stress fractures, which can sideline athletes. This is especially important for swimmers who may not get as much impact-exercise as say, runners do.

Vitamin D improves immune health

A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2009 looked at nearly 19,000 Americans and found that those with the lowest levels of vitamin D in their blood were more likely to suffer from the cold/flu virus.

Optimizing your performance

Peak athletic performance is estimated to occur when vitamin D levels in the blood are between >32-50 ng/mL. Food sources include fish (4 oz. canned salmon or tuna provides roughly 600 IU vitamin D), fortified milk and other fortified foods. A word of caution: taking more than 5,000 IU per day may worsen athletic performance. Besides, the Institute of Medicine’s upper limit is set at 4,000 IU per day. Getting a blood test done at the doctor’s office is the only way to know what your vitamin D level is.

If your swimming training program is indoors and you use sunscreen for times that you’re outside, it may be a good idea to get your vitamin D level checked.

Did you know?

• Sunscreen with SPF 8 or higher completely blocks UVB rays, which prevents vitamin D production in the body
• It is nearly impossible to get too much vitamin D from the sun, since vitamin D production in the body stops when the body senses it has enough
• Individuals with dark skin have a lower ability to produce vitamin D from the sun
• Fish is one of the few food sources of vitamin D. Dietary supplements are a convenient way to obtain the nutrient
• Vitamin D3 is more bioavailable than vitamin D2. If using supplements, look for the D3 form
• The RDA for vitamin D is 600 IU for most adults and children over age 1

Erin Kelley, MS, RD is a registered dietitian and member of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Take a sneak peak at the Race Club’s swim camps 2012 with two promising young swimmers Erik Risolvato and Joshua Romany. Erik went a 22.7 in the 50 meter free to win Junior Nationals last year. Joshua is only 16 and breaking records in Trinidad and Tobago. Check out the first of two webisodes as Erik and Josh demonstrate their dry land training with Coach Gary Hall Sr

Recently, at the Ohio state high school championship meet, Erik swam 19.6 in the 50 free, 44.0 in the 100 free, 48.2 in the 100 fly and 22.5 in the 50 back…all within the three hour meet. Not bad….for  a 5’ 10” junior in high school.

So how does a kid from Lima manage to do this? Talent certainly has a lot to do with it.  For me, Erik is an ongoing experiment, though. It all started about three years ago when Erik came to his first Race Club camp. Of course, I saw the talent and potential, but in one week I began to orchestrate the technical changes and pathway that would help lead to his recent successes (he won Junior Nationals last summer with a 22. 7 LCM). What makes the journey unusual is that aside from one annual visit to Lima for a few days and an occasional visit from Erik to the Keys, I have done all of the coaching of Erik vicariously through his father who is a dentist with a busy practice. Erik Sr. and his brother, Cory, coach Erik and a few of his teammates on the side, starting at 5 am. I just map out the strategy and workout plans and Erik’s father and uncle carry them out.

Erik has not been the only beneficiary of this new Race Club coaching strategy. Shawnee High School, where Erik attends, set a new district record in the 4 x 50 free relay with a time of 1:24.47. Having a 19.6 lead off didn’t hurt, but the other three swimmers on the relay consisted of two cross-country runners who have no intention of swimming in college next year and one football player who is only a sophomore and had never swum a complete season before. After one Race Club camp last fall and following the same plan, the three of them averaged 21.6 split times, again not bad for non-swimmers.

At The Race Club, we pride ourselves in helping swimmers make important technical changes in their swimming strokes. We pay attention to the details that make a difference between fast and not-so-fast swimming. We also share lots of information about why swimmers should pay attention to those details and the five important training disciplines of fast swimming. Yet, when the Race Club campers leave us, we have not had the opportunity for ongoing interaction with them. We could only hope they would retain much of what they learned here until the next visit.

The fact is that many of our swimmers come from areas like Lima that may not have an ideal training environment. I have known many parents and families that have uprooted and moved to a different community just to help their children or themselves succeed with a better program environment. Sometimes that works out and sometimes it doesn’t. The point is that now there may be another option.

The Race Club now offers on-going coaching services that will provide continuity for our swimmers’ training and camps. These services will range in scope from minimal to comprehensive, depending on the situation and the swimmer’s needs. Whenever an existing coach is involved, we will work with that coach to develop a seasonal and career strategy, mapping out cycles, workouts, meets and goals. For comprehensive training, as we did with Erik, we will provide a regimen for all five important disciplines of training: swimming, strength/stretching/dryland, mental training, nutrition and recovery.

So the Erik experiment is working. While it may be very important to have a coach on deck, that coach does not need to necessarily be the conductor of the orchestra in order to achieve the desired outcome. We are very excited to offer our new coaching services. We hope you will discover what we can do for you.

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr.

Email for consultation packages and rates.

Check out this video by Amy Hall featuring our swim camps 2012 at the Race Club. This year we had quite a talented range of swimmers at our Christmas training camp. We work on starts, turns and swimming techniques that make a big difference. Song:

What makes the induction process unusual is that the public gets to join in the voting. Voters are allowed to cast a vote once per day up until April 9, the final day of voting on the following link:

http://halloffamevoting.teamusa.org/

The public vote totals will be added to the totals of the Olympians’, Paralympians’ and US Olympic Family members’ votes to determine which of the six Olympians and one Paralympian will be inducted. In addition, there is a category for the team of the year and one of the nominees is the 1976 USA Women’s 4 x 100 freestyle relay that upset the steroid-laden East German team to win the Olympic gold medal.

This year, I am very proud that my son, Gary Jr, is one of the Olympian nominees. Biased as I am, Gary’s Olympic Games history of accomplishments is extraordinary; three Olympic Games (96, 00, and 04), 10 Olympic races and 10 Olympic medals; 5 gold, 3 silver and 2 bronze. Unlike many athletes that had amazing careers, Gary saved his best swims for the Olympic Games. He was an Olympic Gamer.

What many people do not remember is that six of Gary’s ten medals, and both individual gold medals, were won after he was diagnosed with type I diabetes. In fact, the diagnosis came about one year before the Olympic Games in Sydney, when three different endocrinologists told him that he would never make an Olympic team again. Once he decided to prove them wrong, he elected to train for the 50 meter sprint only, leaving the more difficult and taxing 100 meters behind.

On the last day of the Janet Evans Invitational in Los Angeles in 2000, a last-chance meet to qualify for the Olympic Trials, Gary’s coach, Mike Bottom, asked Gary to lead off the 4 x 100 free relay. Gary hadn’t swum the 100 meters for over a year. Even though he hadn’t trained for that event, his lead off leg was barely under the cut for the Olympic Trials. Mike then convinced Gary that swimming the 100 meters at the Trials would be a good warm up swim for the 50 later in the meet.

On the morning of the 100 meter freestyle preliminaries at the Trials in Indianapolis, Gary was in one of the first heats, having one of the slowest qualifying times. He reeled off a 49 low, qualifying second behind Neal Walker. In the finals, he placed second behind Neal, qualifying to swim the 100 free in Sydney, an event he had not planned to enter just 3 weeks before.

Who can forget the famous or infamous 4 x 100 men’s freestyle relay of Sydney, perhaps the most exciting relay race ever…at least until USA vs France in 2008? In this relay, the lead changed hands between the Australian and American teams seven times, before Ian Thorpe touched out Gary Jr on the final stroke to the wall. Michael Klimm may have had the best swim on both teams, leading off for Australia with a world record, but Gary Jr had the fastest split of everyone, even though his team did not win.

That night, in a meeting of a rather despondent Team USA, Gary Jr broke the silence by saying ‘we may have lost the battle tonight…but we haven’t lost the war’. Team USA rebounded to have one of its best Olympic performances ever, while Team Australia, after their emotional air-guitar celebration of the relay, did not fare as well. Gary Jr also rebounded in those Games to win the bronze medal in the 100 freestyle from lane 7, tied his American teammate, Anthony Ervin, for the gold in the 50 meter freestyle and anchored the gold-medal winning 4 x 100 medley with a new world record.

Minutes after the medley relay victory, when NBC was trying to herd the four swimmers together for an interview on the Today show, the manager of Team USA asked for my help. Gary Jr was nowhere to be found. We searched high and low and finally, I found him lying in the grass near some tents behind the swimming stadium. He barely knew who he was. He was nearly in a diabetic coma. His blood sugar was in the low 20’s.

After getting some juice, he later came around and even made the end of the interview, but it reminded me of the seriousness of his disease and what he has to deal with every day, Olympic competition or not. Of all his career swims, including winning the 50 meter freestyle in Athens as the oldest male ever to win, I still consider those five 100 freestyles he did in Sydney, 2 on relays and 3 in the individual races, as his most courageous efforts. I often wonder what he might have done if he had been able to train for them.

In the long run, it doesn’t really matter. All of his Olympic performances, from nearly upsetting the great Russian swimmer, Alex Popov, in Atlanta in 1996 and coming from third place to first in the 4 x 100 relay with the fastest split ever, to becoming the oldest male swimmer in history to win an Olympic gold at 29 in Athens in 2004, were stellar. With his second fastest lifetime 50-meter freestyle, he narrowly missed making his fourth Olympic team at the age of 34 in 2008, ending his swimming career. He deserves his place in the Olympic Hall of Fame. I hope you will vote for him every day until April 9.

Vote for Gary Jr!

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr.

Gary Hall Sr sits down with George Bovell and they discuss a variety of topics such as this year’s Olympic Games in London, a funny story from the suit era, the 4th fastest freestyle in history at 21.2 seconds, Free Diving and how the Sport has helped his Swimming and recovering from a dump truck crashing into his car head on. George is set to compete in the 50 and 100 meter freestyle in what will be his 4th Olympic Games.

So how important is it to have strength training be a part of your regimen? For sprinters who want to be competitive, I would say it is vitally important. However, just as in your swimming training, the type of strength training one does can play a huge role in the success or lack of.

What makes swimming so interesting and somewhat unique is the paradoxical relationship between the forces that slow us down (frontal drag) and the forces that propel us (biomechanics of propulsion). In most sports, the stronger one gets, the further one can hit the ball or faster one can run or harder one can hit. Not always so in swimming.

With swimming, the relative value of adding strength is greater when one is younger, smaller and slower than it is when one has gotten bigger and faster. The improvement in speed attained from the natural growth and additional strength from going through puberty, for example, may be greater than at any other point in the career of a swimmer.

Once a swimmer reaches a certain size and speed, however, gaining additional speed by purely adding strength (and size) becomes more problematic. The physics of frontal drag simply get in the way. With the density of water some 800 times greater than air, the sensitivity of frontal drag forces to minute changes in the shape of the human body, including arms and legs, moving through the water, particularly at speeds of good swimmers, is extraordinarily high. The sensitivity of adding speed from additional strength at this point is relatively low.

In other words, if we put aerobic conditioning aside just for a moment (albeit fully understanding how important this is), if one had to choose between spending more time getting stronger versus swimming with less frontal drag, ie better technique, I would choose the latter any day.

Does this mean our days in the weight room are over? Hardly. In order to swim fast, one needs to be strong. The key is to develop swim-specific strength in the correct swimming motions and positions that also create the least frontal drag. That is the tricky part, because in swimming, the pulling and kicking motions of the arms and legs that create the most power also contribute more to frontal drag, resulting in a slower swim. In order to swim fastest, we have to learn to avoid the temptation to go to the motions of power and find the motions of least frontal drag, even though they are not as powerful. Then we have to become stronger in those positions. That is what I mean be swim-specific strength training.

To help accomplish this, I have been working with VASA, the swim bench company in Vermont, to try to improve on their existing model. The first prototype that we completed last week, adds several new and unique features to their existing ergometer model. Though I cannot provide any details yet, I am really encouraged that the new model will enable a swimmer to develop the correct swim-specific strength that is vital to swim faster, while simultaneously providing a full body workout.

Yours in swimming,

Gary Sr.

Olympic Swimmer George Bovell shares some tips on how to become a better freediver. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, George has also become a World Class freediver and spearfisherman. Freediving has been an integral part of the Race Club’s swim camps and swimming training program. Just as in Swimming, technique is sooo important along with safety measures one should always take when participating in this dangerous Sport.

For more on our swim camps 2012 visit: http://www.theraceclub.net/swim-camps/

Gary Hall Sr caught up with former Race Club Head Coach and current University of Michigan Head Mens Swimming Coach Mike Bottom at the Orange Bowl Swim Classic in Key Largo. Coach Bottom discusses his busy swimming training program as he faces this Olympic year as well as this years winter training swim camp. He also makes an interesting prediction on who will make the London Games.

Check here for more swim camps in Florida: http://www.theraceclub.net/swim-camps/

I just wanted to let you know that I think you are doing a great job with the Analysis of the Underwater Pull Series.

Been a swimmer for 40 years (high school and college and now doing Triathlons) and a coach for 30 plus years and I am still learning good stuff from your videos.

I really like being able to print off the transcripts…..thanks for doing this…

Keep up the good work.

Best,
Dave