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Dara Torres, DemystifiedDo the swimmer's "secrets to success" hold up?

By Amanda SchafferPosted Wednesday, July 16, 2008, at 4:48 PM ET

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But most of the amino acids mentioned by Warnecke are not in the essential group. It's not clear why taking his supplements would improve muscle repair or boost muscle mass and strength, says John Ivy of the University of Texas. (And just for the record, arginine is no Viagra—taking it orally is not likely to cause blood vessels to dilate.) Meanwhile, eating or drinking protein may be just as effective as taking amino acids, and combining either amino acids or protein with carbs is probably even better for boosting muscle protein synthesis. That's why some experts now say to skip the fancy supplements and drink a glass of chocolate milk. All in all, amino acid supplements sound at best like a pretty minor factor in Torres' success.

What about her second secret? Resistance stretching has "helped all aspects of my conditioning" and "allows me to recover faster from the workouts I endure each day," she declares in a low-budget video demonstrating the technique. (So far, only the introduction has been released.) The basic idea is to contract a muscle while lengthening or stretching it. (Imagine lying on your back with knees together and bent. Then pull your knees apart with your hands while resisting that motion with your leg muscles. Or, watch Al Roker try it.) Torres' sessions sound more elaborate than that, though. Two trainers "mash" or massage her body with their feet, then begin a series of resistance stretches that look like "a cross between a yoga class, a massage, and a Cirque du Soleil performance," as writer Elizabeth Weil put it in the New York Times Magazine. Torres undergoes this routine three times a week when she isn't competing and, in milder form, as many as five times a day when she is. Fitness guru Bob Cooley, who developed the technique, claims that over the course of two weeks, in 1999, it transformed Torres "from being an alternate on the relay team to the fastest swimmer in America."

In combination with other training, Torres' approach is likely to have some benefits. Mainly, stretching muscles against resistance may boost their strength through a greater range of motion, says Malachy McHugh, a sports medicine specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. That is, it may allow people to generate more force with a muscle that's in a lengthened position. (The precise mechanism is controversial. But it could involve increasing the muscle's number of sarcomeres, or contractile units.) Some evidence also suggests that stretching muscles against resistance may help prevent injuries or facilitate recovery from them. Related techniques have long been used in physical therapy to help rehabilitate joints that have been immobilized.

But there are trade-offs. Making a muscle stronger when it's in a lengthened position may mean making it weaker when it's in a shortened one, McHugh says. In addition, it's not necessarily good for swimmers to increase their range of motion too much, especially in their shoulders. "Beyond a certain point, they will actually lose power," says Stacy Ingraham, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Minnesota. (She could not tell from the video whether Torres' technique risked going beyond that threshold.) The bottom line is that resistance stretching may improve a swimmer's performance. But, as Torres' trainer Anne Tierney concedes, there are currently no controlled studies that demonstrate this, and it's hard to see how this technique could really be her record-breaking bullet.

The mystery is not why Torres might try resistance stretching. It's why she promotes it to reporters and touts it in a video that feels like a late-night infomercial. According to Tierney, Torres has no financial interest in the video and was not even paid to appear in it. That's striking, coming from an athlete who has raked in cash from sponsorships from Speedo and Toyota. Perhaps Torres simply wanted to get the word out about a technique she believes is helping her. Or perhaps she wished to give her stretchers and their company, Innovative Body Solutions, a nice gift. (The company's Web site crashed last week from all the traffic.) But the more she talks about secrets to success that really can't hold all that water, the more it looks like she's straining for an innocent-sounding explanation when there may not be one. And the more one wonders about the secrets she may be hiding.