swimming
Published Saturday July 19th, 2008
If you are of a certain vintage - If you are of a certain vintage - you watched Three's Company and All in the Family, you cheered (or jeered) when the Toronto Maple Leafs last won the Stanley Cup - you will recall a special torture parents put their children through in summer.
On stifling days at the beach or the pool, with the sun beating down and the cool water beckoning, mother after mother could be heard admonishing impatient children: "It isn't an hour yet!"
Ah, the dreaded hour rule. Somewhere, in the far reaches of time, someone deemed it unsafe to swim for an hour after eating. Even dabbling in shallow water risked a life-threatening cramp that could pull a child to a watery grave.
When's the last time you heard anyone invoke the hour rule?
"My mother called me last week just to remind me," says Dr. Gord Sleivert, chuckling at his own joke.
Sleivert is a physiologist and vice-president of sports performance at the Canadian Sports Centre Pacific, a training facility in Victoria for elite athletes.
He says Olympic swimmers are actually encouraged to have a little food before they swim competitively. They may even have snacks with them poolside.
Their coaches have no fear that half a banana or a few bites of a sports bar will result in race-ending cramps, Sleivert says.
"To the contrary, we want to make sure that they are fuelled up, that they're well hydrated and that they can perform."
Virtually everyone who grew up in the 1960s and '70s remembers the prohibition on swimming after eating. But finding anyone who can tell you where the notion came from and how it became accepted wisdom is a challenge.
And pinpointing why and when mothers and fathers stopped enforcing the unnecessary rule isn't easy either.
Neither the Canadian nor American Red Cross organizations, the Canadian YMCA nor the Lifesaving Society of Canada can do more than guess at how the advice came about. In the case of the Red Cross societies, both insist they didn't stop promulgating the advice because, as far as they can tell, they never issued it in the first place.
"Certainly it was the wisdom that my parents used when I was a child as well," says Shelley Dalke, national co-ordinator for swimming and water safety programs for the Canadian Red Cross. "And so I know that it's been around a long time."
"But there's never been anything that we (at the Red Cross) could find that substantiated why that's in place."
Ian Fleming, an archivist at the YMCA's Canadian head office, did find a bit of documented evidence, in The Royal Life Saving Society Handbook of Instruction, published in 1936.
"The most suitable time to bathe is about two hours after a meal, when food taken previously will have become partially digested," it advises in its Hints to Bathers.
"On no account bathe shortly after a hearty meal, when exhausted from vigorous exercise, when the body is cooling after perspiring nor, on the other hand, when shivering ..."
The presumption is that the "don't swim after eating" advice was based on the idea that the stomach and the limbs would be competing for oxygen-rich blood.
"My guess is the theory at the time was something along the lines of: Well, you've just eaten a lot of food, therefore you're sending a lot of your blood to the gut area ... therefore it's not available to the muscles and therefore you may get into trouble while swimming," Sleivert says.
Dr. Peter Wernicki, aquatics chair of the American Red Cross advisory council on first aid, aquatics, safety and preparedness, says it is true some blood is shunted to the gut in digestion.
"(But) any healthy person has plenty of blood and plenty of oxygen and they can do both," he says from Vero Beach, Fla.
"If you really are going to vigorously exercise - any exercise - eating a large meal beforehand is not a great idea," Wernicki adds.
"It can make you uncomfortable. It might affect your performance somewhat. But it's not going to make you drown."
Sleivert says there is a theory that "stitches-" as in a stitch in your side - are caused by the weight of a full stomach on the ligaments that hold it in place.
But he suggests running on a full stomach is more likely to trigger a stitch than swimming.
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