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The fact that swimming would be developed at an international top level as far north as Rovaniemi might sound funny to many.
However, the claim is true, because the development of swimming in Rovaniemi is almost ten years behind us. However, the current, quite extensive swimming research, development and innovation complex was not built from the beginning in a planned way, but the complex grew over the years.
According to Jukka Shemeika, who works as the architect of the development work and is responsible for swimming at Santasport , the development work started with the construction of a new swimming teaching model, because it was felt necessary to start learning to swim at an earlier age than before.
The model was created as the final thesis of an upper university of applied sciences degree and the end result was a swimming teaching model based on research data, which still serves Santasport’s swimming schools today.
The need for change has acted as a clear initial impetus in all matters recorded in the swimming development strategy. This also applies to the current swimming teaching and competitive and elite swimming research projects, which started from the need for a deeper understanding of body movements while swimming.
However, there was no ready-made research information available on these subject areas, so according to Shemeika, the easiest thing was to research the matter himself. The research itself has started as the sum total of many things.
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In the years 2014-2016, I participated in several trainings, which dealt with, among other things, business analysis. Along with my own training and experiences came the idea to study coordination in swimming.
At the same time, we started cooperation with the Finnish company Polar, known for its heart rate monitors, which today plays a key role in driving development forward.
As a coaching center with Olympic Training Center status, Santasport has a national special task in coaching snow sports and developing skill coaching.
Swimming is suitable for the latter, as it is a universal movement. In swimming, producing the direction of movement has been selected as a research object, so the same laws can be found in, for example, walking, running and skiing.
As an element, water offers a unique environment to study movement, because the resistance of water is almost 800 times compared to air. It is difficult to make the same observations while moving on land, so it is believed that through the research work, ideas for other forms of movement will also be born.
Global promotion of competence
Swimming studies produced earlier in the world have focused on studying the movement of parts of the body, for example the hands, but not the whole body together, as is done in Rovaniemi.
When studying the coordination of the whole body, several variables must be taken into account, which makes the study more challenging. In addition to this, at Santasport, the involvement of myofascial continuums in producing movement is studied in the same context.
Many people abroad have stated that the research setup is too difficult, but I think the phenomenon is not difficult to interpret. Only the approach can make it challenging, Shemeikka carves.
According to Shemeika, it is important that the research results carried out in Rovaniemi are published worldwide, because in the big picture, the goal is to develop general water safety. Some people are able to move more easily in the water, and according to the swimming coach, there is a logical explanation for that.
According to Shemeika’s view, expanding the understanding of the logic in question can lead to, for example, better learning results in swimming lessons or better performance in competitive swimming.
Santasport’s vision in the development of swimming has long been to do swimming lessons and competitive and elite swimming in parallel. The ongoing competitive and elite swimming research project includes several phases, which currently include freestyle and backstroke as swimming sports.
The results of the first research phase of free swimming opened up a connection with childhood and learning to swim, which was a discovery of global interest.
The development of coordination related to swimming skills in the childhood stage attracted the most attention in the world, especially in elite swimming, when the results were published in an American swimming online publication.
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Over the years, we have learned to be quite agile operators, so we were able to start swimming teaching research relatively quickly in cooperation with the Lapland University of Applied Sciences, Shemeikka says.
