Marion James, a FSI PhD student based in our Performance Sports Engineering Laboratory (PSEL) at the University of Southampton while on holiday in the USA last month was pleased to see the outcome of some performance testing undertaken awhile ba
ck in the University of Southampton Jubilee Pool. She commented, ‘Speedo USA asked us to drag-test and evaluate the performances of several products to support the training programme of high-level swimmers, and especially sprinters. As a result, two products ‘Dragster’ and ‘Dragtini’ are now available on the US market. They act as a parachute to increase the swimmer’s drag during a training session in order to provide higher intensity training and power-up swimming performances.
PSEL has been looking into swimming drag over the last six years. A recent paper in Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology by lead author Angus Webb looks at how repeatable techniques are for measuring a swimmer’s resistance when towed passively
