June 19, 2012

FULL-BODY ANALYSIS OF SWIMMING TECHNIQUES




Full-Body Analysis of Swimming Techniques

In competitive swimming the dolphin kick is performed after the start and after each turn in all four strokes. It is therefore a substantial part of the actual competition, and any insights that can aid the performance of the dolphin kick will aid the performance as a whole.

An integrated approach is taken at the Flow Simulation and Analysis Group to further the understanding of the dolphin kick and swimming in general. The first step consists of laser body scans taken of Olympic athletes and kindly provided by USA Swimming. These laser body scans are then meshed into thousands of triangles, our unstructured triangular surface mesh, using the software GAMBIT. On average 20000 triangles are used, with finer triangles and denser packing used at areas of higher curvature.

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