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[Encased in burning magma]

Okay so...

I'm trying to build a spartan-nazi fort. It's goal is to build the ultimate dwarves, with the best genes and training (as in "the whole fort is a danger room" kind).
I got most of the parts down, but I can't train them to swim efficiently.

First draft was to designate a meeting area near the river, and pump like crazy. While hilarious, the amount of losses was inacceptable.

My next plan is to move beds, dining rooms, barracks... to the lower level and flood it 3/7.

Would that work?

[Johnny Madhouse]

I think the level has to be 4/7 for creatures to consider swimming. Aside from that, you'll probably just get a lot of cancelled movement spam as water sloshes about and dwarves decide their destinations are inaccessible. They also won't use beds safely if the bed is underwater: being unconscious in deep enough water is a recipe for drowning, and they are smart enough to avoid that threat, at least. A dining hall with a few tiles of 4/7 sloshing about in a room of mostly 3/7 would work, I think.

There is also the possibility of incorporating several retracting bridges over small ponds with escape ramps into your fortress design, along with a method of triggering the bridges fairly randomly and a method of draining to ponds to recover dropped items.

[Pilsu]

Use an airlock design to flood the room. Water less than 7 deep is suitable for training, says the wiki. Depth of at least 4 is required. Be sure to have a staircase somewhere with a locked hatch on it in case something goes wrong and someone starts drowning. Drain the room back into the reservoir once done.

A design that creates a steady flow would likely train them faster. Assuming the pumps don't always create a full tile, regardless of the amount available.

[Shoku]

A certain megaproject recently made something for this. The dwarves would walk over a grate behind a pump's output so they would get knocked down into a pool. There'd be waves of water so that they probably needed decent swimming skill to get back out of it.

Edit: Though I should probably bring up what I knew about it from 40d. They were intensely unwilling to path through 4/7 deep water but I would have my soldier patrol through it anyway thanks to a little peculiarity in pathing. I had to have a second path for them to walk through initially but when they started to run into each other and had to find a way around the 4/7 deep water was acceptable to them. So I made a long winding path above the wading hallway.

There have been some slight changes to pathing since then so you may be fine just telling them to go through deep water.