The aim of the present paper was to survey the state of the art on swimming physiology as related to coaching practice in order to help bridging the gap between theory and practice. Systematic literature searches were performed through the years 1990 - 2006 utilising EBSCOhost Research Databases and SportDiscus. Ovid Medline was used to scan materials for randomized controlled trials. The searches were done in three Steps using both key words and thesaurus decodes. In the first phase, "Swimming" without limitations was fed to the System and repeated with animals excluded, second, "Swimming" and "Physiology" were used and third, some subdivisions were connected to the precedents. One may conclude that the body of knowledge for the improvement of sports coaching and fitness training in Swimming is large and well represented in the subdivisions of Swimming Physiology.
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