Many Panther swimmers set new season best times this past weekend, and there is a very logical explanation for all this explosion of improvements. It is a concept used commonly in swimming known as tapering.

In swimming, while they want to go out and win as many of their regular season meets as possible, any good team’s primary goal is to win the conference championship meet at the end of the season.

Because of this, swimming is one of the rare sports that schedule competitions around training schedules, where other sports do things the other way around.

So over the course of the season, with several workouts a day for multiple months, the bodies of these student athletes get worn out and broken down.

This is where tapering comes in, as the swimmers slowly scale back their training regiment during the last two or three weeks of the season.

This allows their bodies to recover and be at full strength for the conference championships while reaping the benefits of months of hard training.

This is not just a concept used by college swimmers though. Some high schools also gradually scale back their training volumes as they approach the end of their regular season, and you can only imagine the tapering that occurs heading into the Olympic Games.

Eastern’s swimmers recently began their own tapering process, and based on the leap in results they saw this weekend, I think it is only natural that they will continue to ride this wave of energy towards the four day Summit League Championships in just over two weeks.

The Championship meet will be the next time the Panthers will have to travel, so they will have plenty of time to focus on quality based training until then, rather than traveling and quantity of practice.

The Panthers have one more meet left this season where they are expected to post even more season best times, following another week of recovery.

After that, two more weeks will elapse before they head to Indianapolis, Ind. for their conference championships, so the Panthers’ main concern between now and Feb. 16 should really be to let their bodies recover, but at the same time not lose the benefits of their last few months of grueling training sessions.

So as long as the Panthers can find a happy medium between resting their bodies and maintaining their performance, they can expect great improvements this Saturday against St. Louis and against all their Summit League Foes at the conference Championships in Indianapolis, Ind. Feb. 16-19.

Brad Kupiec can be reached at 581-7944 or [email protected]