This study aimed to evaluate the effect of respiratory muscle training on swimming performance of elite female swimmers. 24 elite female swimmers volunteered to participate in this study and were randomly divided into two groups: a control group who did swimming training without chest wall restriction and an experimental group who did swimming training with chest wall restriction. Both groups participated in a monthly swimming program. They trained 3 times a week for a total of 4 weeks during which they swam 4100 meter at 70– 85% HRmax every session. A Modified Balke test as well as T-20 test were used to measure time to exhaustion and swimming performance, respectively. Both descriptive and inferential statistics (including independent and paired t-test) were used to analyze the data (P<0.05). The results showed that time to exhaustion increased in the experimental group who did training with chest wall restrictor (P=0.012). T-20 test results also showed improvements in the experimental group's average speed (P=0.028), average time for each 100 m (P=0.012), and average swimming distance (P=0.018). There was no significant difference between the two groups. Therefore, the results showed that using chest elastic band (chest wall restrictor) in order to impose more stress on respiratory muscles during exercise leads to some adaptations in these muscles, which may yield improvements in athletic performance.
