Lost Interview: Bill Boomer Discusses Training Trends, Cats and Dogs, and How Coaches Can Adapt for Individual Swimmers’ Bodies

Relive this lost interview with Bill Boomer by Brent Rutemiller in the earlier years of the Morning Swim Show. This interview was produced before mainstream videos and digital media. It was rendered as a .wmv file and as a result the remastered quality is poor. However the content is priceless!

Original Dateline: PHOENIX, Arizona, March 25. TUESDAY’S edition of The Morning Swim Show features an in-depth interview with swimming guru Bill Boomer, filmed at the recent women’s NCAA swimming and diving championships.

Watch this Lost Video

In this 20-minute interview, Boomer, a world-renowned stroke technician, talks about the changes he has seen regarding the way swimmers are trained.

“When I first got into the sport, it was about building engines,” he told host Brent Rutemiller. “The sport has changed through the introduction of the nervous system into the practice of the sport.”

He said in the late 1990s, he saw a shift from swimming large volumes in the water to recognizing the function of the brain in becoming familiar and comfortable in the water.

In the interview, Boomer expands on his theory by equating the different training systems to the lives of dogs and cats. He offers tips to coaches on setting up their swimmers to race fast in a workout environment. Visualization is also a key element in balancing the nervous system and enhancing the swimmer’s feel of the water.

Some of the swimmers he mentions to make his theories more concrete are Gary Hall Jr., Dara Torres, Janet Evans, Mark Spitz and Michael Phelps.

Email us at ISHOF@SwimmingWorld.com if you know of other lost video interview that you would like for us to remaster.

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Ronald Hehn

5 years ago

This is a gem!

Old School

5 years ago

Didn’t hear Boomer give any credit to Coach Silvia for the nervous system stuff (all done in the 50’s and 60’s and 70’s) nor to Coach Sweetenham of Australia for the Cats and Dogs analogy. Boomer makes great points, but those points are not his own.