Torque and power about the joints of the arm during the freestyle stroke

Biography

Dr Simon Harrison completed his bachelor’s degrees of Engineering (Mechanical) and Science (Chemistry), and a PhD in the simulation of soft tissue deformation at the University of Western Australia. Subsequent to this, he held a Research Fellow position at the University of Melbourne under Prof Marcus Pandy from 2007 until 2010. In this position he investigated the biomechanical causes of equine limb injury and human knee osteoarthritis. After a short tenure at DSTO looking at human performance and injury models, he took a position as a Research Scientist at CSIRO in 2011. Currently he applies mesh-free particle methods to problems in the areas of human performance, injury, and health, with a number of research collaborators and industry partners.

Synopsis

Competitive swimming involves a complicated interplay between athlete strength and technique and the response of the water to the movement of the athlete. Unlike land based sports, where loading from the ground can been measured and used to estimate muscular exertion, it is practically impossible to measure loading on the body from the water and deduce muscular effort. It is not known precisely how modified strength or endurance attributes affect the performance of an athlete, nor is it known how this relationship varies with modified technique or between athletes. Knowledge of the dependence of joint torque and joint power on changes to stroke technique and athlete anthropometry would provide a valuable basis to understand the relationship between muscular effort and performance during competitive swimming.

Computational models of swimming have recently been shown to successfully predict fluid and athlete behaviour during swimming, despite the significant challenges in simulating this environment (Cohen et al. 2012). Traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling techniques are not well suited to predicting the interactions between moving bodies in water or the behaviour of the surface of water. Recent progress in this area is attributable in part to the development of methods that can simulate each of the aspects of the physical environment of swimming. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is a method that is especially well suited to modelling the moving and deforming shape of the swimmer skin surface and the dynamic interactions with the fluid.