Greetings -
I'm looking for some input. I am a 61 year old male who primarily swims freestyle and butterfly. My structured swim workouts are Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings. I swim in meets occasionally, mostly sprints, and want to increase my competitiveness.
Lifting weights is also a part of my workout regime. I have been advised to only exercise each muscle group once a week, but do so with extreme vigor, going to failure or near failure on my sets. I've got that currently split as follows, and with my swim workouts, my schedule looks like this:
Saturday: Delts, Lats, Traps, Triceps, Forearms
Monday: Pecs, Biceps, Glutes, and Quads
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: Swim
My strategy is to work with weights on the most heavily used muscles for free and fly on Saturday, giving me three days rest before my swim workout. (Weight lifting interferes with my swimming if I try to do it the same day or even the day before). The Monday lifting workout is meant to focus on muscles less used in these strokes and therefore have less impact on the quality of my swim workout for the rest of the week.
If you both swim and lift, I would value your observations on this strategy. Thanks.:)
A remark on that swimmingscience.net/.../ : it speaks about "school and college", and for me this is a sure sign that this has not much relevance for the masters. Many masters swim for health, very few for records (sure, some do). And furthermore there is the long-term aspect: for many of us swimming, strength-training etc. as preparation for old-age is important, but of course doesn't concern the young. A sad example for this is the bad propaganda against kicking training, since it would only provide this little for your speed: too many people, although swimming, cycling, running completely irrelevant times (from an absolute perspective!), behave as if training for their last Olympic race, crowning their life time, and thus over-emphasise the short-term benefits, and tend to completely ignore the long-term benefits. Kicking training is a long-term investment --- and most of us will swim in 10,20,30,40 years, so it's worth doing! Same with strength training -- the early you start the better it is, and for many of us I believe whether it'll make you slower for the next couple of months really doesn't matter.
A remark on that swimmingscience.net/.../ : it speaks about "school and college", and for me this is a sure sign that this has not much relevance for the masters. Many masters swim for health, very few for records (sure, some do). And furthermore there is the long-term aspect: for many of us swimming, strength-training etc. as preparation for old-age is important, but of course doesn't concern the young. A sad example for this is the bad propaganda against kicking training, since it would only provide this little for your speed: too many people, although swimming, cycling, running completely irrelevant times (from an absolute perspective!), behave as if training for their last Olympic race, crowning their life time, and thus over-emphasise the short-term benefits, and tend to completely ignore the long-term benefits. Kicking training is a long-term investment --- and most of us will swim in 10,20,30,40 years, so it's worth doing! Same with strength training -- the early you start the better it is, and for many of us I believe whether it'll make you slower for the next couple of months really doesn't matter.
