Swimming Caps

After goggles, swimming caps are the most common optional piece of gear in the sport. The commonly held belief is that the latex or rubber cap provides less drag through the water than flowing hair, and that a cap will protect the hair from the caustic chemicals in most swimming pools. Not true. The truth about swimming caps is they're hot, hot, HOT. This is why most swimmers don't use them in practice and only female swimmers or swimmers with long hair commonly wear them. So let's look at the swimming cap's perceived benefits and decide whether the use of one is really for you.

Performance
Swimming caps make you faster, right? Nope. The difference in drag between a closely cropped head of hair and a cap is minimal at best. Furthermore, that cap acts like an insulator keeping all the heat your head is trying to radiate away from your body, while highly exerting yourself, trapped. Most of a body's working fatigue comes from the heat generated by the muscles in the act of working. When the muscle gets hot, it becomes ineffective. The body tries to cool muscles by moving more blood through them and by increasing skin evaporation rates by sweating. The blood is moved towards the skin where evaporation can help cool the body and the working muscles down. One of the primary areas where the body tries to evaporate excess heat is the head, which is why your face gets red if you're working out. Insulating your head while working hard stops your body from being able to cool down and results in faster and deeper fatigue. So if this is the case, why are caps used at all?

The drawbacks to swimming with a cap on are cumulative. So over a short period of time, say that of a 50, the swimmer will hardly notice any increase in fatigue. However, once a swimmer is exerting themselves for longer distances, say 200 and higher, the difference in fatigue becomes noticeable. You will often see many distance swimmers eschewing the use of a cap in order to stave off heat-based fatigue as long as possible. The only time that a swimming cap is really useful is if you have long hair.

If you have hair that gets in your eyes or even your mouth when you're trying to breathe, then a cap is really necessary. Turning or moving your head in order to get the hair out of your way can alter your stroke drastically, ruining your body position and resulting in slower times. So for swimmers who swim shorter races but have longer hair, the cap isn't a bad idea. But, a swimming cap will help protect my hair, right? Sorry.

Hair Care
A swimming cap has not yet been invented to keep the caustic water of a swimming pool away from your hair. Caps are also made out of materials that themselves are damaging to hair. The latex or silicone pulls, breaks, and splits hair in ways only the Marquis de Sade would find appealing. Furthermore, the water that does get into a cap has a chance to really soak those chemicals deep into your hair and ruin your hair that way. If you really care about your hair (though you might guess that most swimmers just give up), you will need to treat it every time you finish your practice.

Once you get out of the water, and have taken care of your swimsuit, take a shower. Wash the hair with shampoo, and rinse it out completely. The water from the shower is normal tap water and thus nowhere near as caustic to your hair as the pool water you just left. Washing your hair will remove all the chemicals that swimming in the pool put in. Next, and most importantly, apply conditioner. The chemicals in pool water have, during your practice, settled on the hair follicles and leached them of all the natural oils that keep it safe from breaking. Conditioner will return as much of that oil to your hair as you need. Specialty hair products have recently been invented to prevent severe damage to the hair folicles. Some of which can be found here.

Cap Use
If you must keep your golden locks intact and have figured out how to maintain that gorgeous mane of yours with shampoo and conditioner, how on earth do you get a cap on your head? Well believe it or not, before I figured out that a cap was not for me, I developed a way of putting a cap on that worked well for me. Now I've seen many swimmers put a cap on wet. They fill the cap with water, bend at the waist, and displace the water in the cap with their head. This sets the cap nicely on your head, but as soon as you dive in the water, the wet hair inside the cap acts like a lubricant and can shift the cap over your goggles or even back over your head to get caught in the goggle strap. Not only are you without your cap, but you're also swimming blind.

To combat the shifting of the cap during the dive, many of us developed a method of putting on the cap dry. Be sure if you have long hair, that you've braided, pinned, or bunned (whatever it is you do to get your hair up and out of the way) prior to this process or you will rip it out of your head. Arrange the cap so that you are holding onto the sides with the cap upside down and the front "brim" facing your chest. Take that brim and place it firmly at your forehead. While tilting your head forward, pull your hands, which are still holding the sides of the cap, down to your shoulders. This seats the cap firmly across the front and top of your head. Then slowly return the sides of the cap to behind your ears. At this point you can tuck in any stray hair that might have come loose during the process. If done right it looks like you're the Incredible Hulk bursting out of your cap and can be very intimidating to your opponents. Furthermore, the dry hair and skin under the cap act like a seal against water coming in under the cap and making it mobile. Water will still seep in, but it will happen slowly, allowing your dive to be unaffected by equipment malfunctions.

I know this is all pretty daunting which is why swimmers the world over keep rediscovering the following truth: the best thing you can do for your hair and for your performance is to cut it off. Nothing ever beats a shaved head in the water and nothing protects your hair like no hair.

Shampoos & Conditioners

Swimming Caps