You must enjoy wearing wetsuits if you compete in triathlons. They prevent the freezing water from paralyzing your arm and leg muscles and sinking your ship before you reach land. They can also increase swimming speed by 3 to 7 per cent, giving you an advantage of 50 to 100 meters over a competitor swimming without a suit in a 1500-meter swim.
Wet suits aid lean swimmers significantly more than obese ones, according to scientific research, and they boost swimming speed more in shorter competitions than in longer ones. Because a neoprene wetsuit increases buoyancy, one of its key effects, slim swimmers have an advantage over bulkier swimmers. Because they have their built-in wet suits, plump folks already have buoyancy. Because they have little blubber to float on, skinny people float poorly, and their hefty body parts tend to sink like stones. Vissla 3/2 wetsuits increase buoyancy, allowing swimmers to maintain a horizontal position near the top of the water column while using less energy to prevent sinking. This translates into more effort being put into direct, forward propulsion.
Another way wetsuits assist swimmers is by reducing drag, or the friction between the body of the swimmer and the water. Wetsuits, according to scientists, minimize this performance-decreasing drag by 14%. Wetsuits may not genuinely benefit all sorts of swimmers, however, that is uncertain. Top swimmers, for instance, might not need wet suits since they have already streamlined their motions by improving their stroke and kick technique, as well as by cutting off body hair. For similar reasons, it’s conceivable that top triathletes would not benefit much from suits. Maybe the suits are most effective for inexperienced or untrained swimmers.
Scientists in France recently examined two groups of swimmers: international-level swimmers and international-level triathletes, to understand what effects wetsuits will have on various sorts of athletes. The triathletes averaged 15 hours of training per week but just four hours of actual swimming, covering a total of 13 kilometres, compared to the swimmers which were about 17 hours per week for a distance of 60 kilometres. Each group’s average age was 21, although swimmers were noticeably heavier. Swimmers averaged 400-meter personal best times of 3:58, compared to 4:49 for triathletes, making the swimmers noticeably faster than triathletes overall.
Why did the triathletes benefit from the suits, but the swimmers did not? For starters, the suits did not reduce drag or the energy cost of swimming in swimmers; but they did reduce drag in triathletes by 10% to 22% and their real cost of swimming by 7 to 20%. This is partly because swimmers naturally had superior buoyancy than triathletes. After all, they were a little bit heavier and could fill more of their lungs with air.
So, donning a buoyant wet suit had less of an effect on their performances. Another explanation might have been that the swimmers were better at maintaining a horizontal body position near the top of the water column due to their heavier training loads. Thus, through countless hours of practice, the seasoned swimmers had already perfected the fundamental benefit of a wet suit getting the body up and flat in the water without sinking legs or feet.
