The Globe and Mail

The supersuit Michael Phelps will wear at the London Games this summer is a garment to marvel at – although not for the reasons you might think. It is an incredible feat of engineering, one that you can buy and try out for yourself.

Die-hard sport enthusiasts have always been glad to shell out for elite gear, and swimmers looking for a leg up on the competition can now get their hands on the same suits expected to break records at the Olympics, assuming, of course, they can squeeze themselves into it.

The entire FASTSKIN3 Racing System (which includes a hydrodynamic cap and goggles) makes the kind of scientific boasts made when talking about rockets or sports cars in wind tunnels. Speedo unveiled the system in November and began shipping orders this year. Its space-age design is certainly good news for athletes fighting to gain even a millisecond advantage over the competition. But for mere mortals who buy one of the super-elite systems, which retails for $535, the first wide-eyed moment of wonder will come when they take the suit out of its box and hold it up to their bodies. This is a compression garment like no other.

“They look like they’re for the baby,” my wife said of the trunks as I held them up.

Which brings us to the gloves. Every FASTSKIN3 swimsuit comes with a pair of them – thin white cotton gloves with rubberized finger tips. They’re not meant to improve your front crawl – they’re meant to help you pull the suit on.

U.S. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte has said the suit makes him feel “superhuman.” Typical recreational swimmers might feel more like 200 pounds of ground beef being squeezed into a sausage casing. Putting the suit on requires patience.

“It is a bit of a wrestle to get it up your body,” says Dr. Tom Waller, head of Speedo’s Aqualab, the company’s research and development facility. “The first time you put it on [it will take] 15 to 20 minutes, the second time five to 10.” By the third, fourth and fifth time, “Most people can get it [on] in around five minutes.”

If taking 15 minutes to squeeze into a swimsuit doesn’t sound like a lazy day at the pool, well, it’s not meant to be. And though getting it on may be an Olympian effort in itself, the results may prove revolutionary.

Consider the system’s highlights: It has been shown to achieve a 16.6 per cent reduction in full body passive drag, an 11 per cent improvement in a swimmer’s oxygen economy, meaning they don’t need to work as hard and a 63.4 per cent reduction of force on the goggle, a major factor for pros because the force on some goggles can be equal to having two Coke cans on each lens, Dr. Waller says.

And then there are more practical features, such as the fact that the goggles, shiny numbers that will make you look like you’ve swum in from the future, provide 180-degree peripheral vision, which anyone doing the backstroke in crowded lanes will surely appreciate.

Combined, the system is a revolutionary product, designed to improve upon Speedo’s LZR Racer, which dominated the Beijing Olympics – 86 per cent of all swimming medals were worn by athletes wearing the suit – but that was subsequently banned in 2010 by FINA, international swimming’s governing body, for making swimmers more buoyant.

With swimmers no longer allowed to wear polyurethane and neoprene suits during competition, the FASTSKIN3, which spent three years in development, is made predominantly with a fabric called Hydro K-Zone 3D.

“It’s a revolutionary new way of making fabric whereby we’re able to position varying amounts of Lycra around the body so that we can compress where we want to and not compress where we don’t want to,” Dr. Waller says.