Swimming after liftin'

Starts and turns are not swimming. For that matter any resistance training alters stroke mechanics. Put on a pair of fins, swim, then take them off. Does your arm/leg rhythm feel the same? You're putting out more force for a brief period as you became comfortable with doing so... but unless you learned to do this in conjunction with what the rest of your body is doing, you can't train separate components and glue them together into 1 faster stroke. Last time I checked, starts and turns were an enormous part of "swimming." This is especially so given that the vast majority of masters racing is in short course. Are you sure about the second proposition or just cogitating? In my own experience, I haven't found this to be true. Look, fast swimming involves quite a bit of innate talent. Strength is not a substitute for talent, technique or high intensity training. (Btw, you'd probably get more bang for your buck if you did some of those 25s @ 3:00 instead of 1:00.) But I don't agree with your analyses or conclusion that strength is largely superfluous. And I agree with Gaash that many masters, probably due to time and life constraints, are underachieving wrt lifting. (People may also be underachieving wrt to yoga and flexibility as well.)

There is a point where strength benefits do not help in swimming, that is for sure, and it probably depends on many factors including stroke efficiency, height, stroke (sprint breaststrokers seem to benefit the most from lifting if I had to guess) but I think, SwimBRCT, you vastly overestimate how many people reach that point and how quickly they reach it, particularly when it comes to women. I agree w/you 100% on the overtraining by the way. However, gains from lifting translate to other activities as there are certain neural muscular/central nervous system improvements to the body that simply cannot be attained with any efficiency without lifting heavy weight.

I disappear for a nice vacation, and discover that my replies have generated quite a bit of discussion! I welcome that, let me know if I didn't address a point. @ElaineK, the studies were not done at SDSU, a professor from SDSU compiled a list of swimming science related studies and links to them on his site. Quoted: "What makes the studies inferior is that there are too many variables they do not control, they do not account for the history of some of the swimmers, etc. They often do not account for how the same particular swimmer would have done w/less strength, which is much more meaningful, and those studies that try to do that (i.e. measure an improvement in strength etc.) often those swimmers are not gaining real muscle and only just training their body how to do the lift in the time the studies are done due to as you correctly point out, overtraining which is waay more real than people think and ESPECIALLY true when heavy weight lifting is introduced. Have you seen Phelps improvements in sprint free since 2007? Coincides when he started doing weights. Did you read Ryan Lochtes comments on how he injured his leg I think in 09 and then his improvement since then, when he could only really lift for a while as opposed to just swim?" @Gaash, your observations about the potential flaws of studies are sound. But I ask that you consider that anecdotal evidence has just as much room to be flawed, if not more. Regarding 'gaining real muscle'... the fastest swimmers are muscular, but not necessarily the most muscular. Added muscle mass is a liability in the water. Note that the era of buoyant supersuits was launched in early 2008 by the LZR. I'm not saying that dryland didn't help Phelps and the other Olympians, but I'd be wary of adopting a practice style simply because the elites and/or other people are doing it. Comes down to this... say your lat pulldown goes from 10 x 30 lbs to 60 lbs... does that guarantee you will swim faster? I say no. What's more, even if it goes down, the time spent getting there is extremely inefficient compared to doing race pace or resisted swimming. There are a lot of people on my team who are far more proficient in the weight room than in the water. They have made strength gains, yes. Their power (speediness) in the water, I can't say. quote: "And when it comes to the women, the benefits are even more dramatic. (Dara Torres, East Germans (no, your rationale is not entirely accurate, strenght advantage was another reason) etc. etc. So one study shows that it doesn't help female swimmers. Look at overall improvements in time, look at the impact of steroids in swimming (if you think it is not also increase muscle mass/less body fat % you are simply nuts" Swimming is not a strength dominated sport, period. As I said before, muscle mass is a liability in swimming. It increases form drag, makes you ride lower in the water. One might say that Phelps and Lochte are very muscular. But there are other swimmers in the B final who are more muscular. They HAPPEN to have a lot of muscle mass, but they are not fast because of it. Also not sure how steroids affect body fat percentage. Your "real study" idea is intriguing. Quote: "This coincides much more to the anecdotal evidence from real life, where we see improvements over the entire world of sprinting more or less where dry land has gone up and swimming time has gone down. It also is much more relevant, as the factors that are most important to swimming between individuals are probably height and technique, but what matters for whether or not a swimmer should lift is whether or not it will improve THEIR OWN swimming speed. Lastly, as I mentioned before, it is possible and probably likely that the returns of strength training are asymtotic (sp?) and that some swimmers, perhaps those with a history of lifting or good genetics have already reached the plateau of where they are strong enough that strength gains are unlikely to have much benefit. However, this is much more likely in men and there is I would say, ZERO likelihood that women can get to that point or EVEN CLOSE without lifting, and probably they cannot even get there without steroids. (Hence part of why women at the elite level are slower than men at sprints, and why the impact of steroids is more dramatic for women in swimming and just about any sport)" Be wary of causation versus correlation. This is not a universal trend, for its population size the United States is not a sprinting nation (despite our short course pools!) www.swimmingscience.net/.../american-sprinters.html You can go look at newer results yourself, not much has changed. Given the principle of specificity, I feel like improvement has come in spite of the "lifting" emphasis and not because of it. However, for those without the foundational strength required for ideal technique for their body type (ex weak hip abductors fro breaststroke kick) then any exercise that stresses those muscles will lead to improvement. It's a paradox, what works well for beginners does not work for "elite"/"established" swimmers. @Fortress "What are you talking about? Wary of change? Unwilling to consider something new? Most people who know me would say the opposite. I've only been lifting more seriously (still not even near my max potential) for 2 years. My times have dropped with more serious drylands. I know others with similar results. Your sport specific strength movements notion is what sounds antiquated. Agree with Gaash on your non-Costill study. It proves nothing without a prior history of sprint times and lifting and a relative before and after comparison of each test subject over a meaningful amount of time. If all you want to do is swim, then swim. But adding more yardage in the pool is not "infinitely better" (I'd like to see the substantiation for this) and will not necessarily make you faster. Maybe you should try some squats and plyos to see if your starts and walls improve. " _______ I wasn't addressing you in particular, it's a widespread coaching belief. (At least at the age group/senior level, I have spent more time in these programs than with masters.) Just because a principle has been around for almost a century does not make it antiquated. I defer to pages 23 of this document for an explanation of specificity. There have not been many studies examining this principle since then as there has been little reason to dispute it. coachsci.sdsu.edu/.../energy39.pdf The Olympic Trials qualifier study (and other studies) are not perfect. However, if you look at the swimming population, most people engage in some form of dryland. Some people seem to benefit from it, some people don't. Those who seem to benefit from it (based on the principle outlined above) are the exception rather than the rule. Fortress, please don't misunderstand me. I am a huge opponent of "garbage yardage". I am referring to the question about whether one could replace a day of swimming with a weight room day. (I just realized that I've been using "dryland" and "lifting/weights" interchangably, but they are very different. Dryland tends to refer to various bodyweight, tubing/medball/battleropes exercises; lifting refers to lifting weights and using fitness machines.) That said, given that a swimmer is not in a physically stressed state, more yardage swum at ideal race pace and with race technique will yield improvement. Starts and turns are not swimming. They are fundamentally different exercises (you have a solid foundation to push off of). Squat jumps are part of my pre swim warmup. @Androvski "This is a myth. Strength training with compound movements (squats, deadlifts, pull ups, clean and jerk, etc) will always transfer to sports. Almost all athletes in pretty much every sport are doing weight training and benefiting A LOT from it." The brain maps movements, not muscles. Please see page 23 of the document above. "The authors warned that land-based resistance training exercises may alter stroke mechanics." For that matter any resistance training alters stroke mechanics. Put on a pair of fins, swim, then take them off. Does your arm/leg rhythm feel the same? You're putting out more force for a brief period as you became comfortable with doing so... but unless you learned to do this in conjunction with what the rest of your body is doing, you can't train separate components and glue them together into 1 faster stroke. Movements that may enable you to do a vasa trainer or tubing pull effectively are not necessarily the same movements you do in the water. When you take the arm movement and separate it from the body roll, you have the freedom to do things that would slow you down in the water, without getting the feedback of slowing down. Simply put, movements that your body adapts to on land are not the movements best suited to going fast in the water. However, when you're racing, your brain will "run the land program" because that's what you're familiar with + that's the movement you trained with resistance (resistance strengthens the familiarity of a movement.) And you will swim less efficiently as a result. "No, you can't. To gain strength you need resistance. Water does not provide enough resistance to develop max strength, period." Yes. But do you need more strength to go faster? For some, yes. But for those who can already approach the force needed for cavitation (slippage)? No. Your cavitation threshhold varies depending on the efficiency of your "catch". Those with better catches can put out more force without slipping. Thanks for the videos. Since we're on the topic of Lochte, he ate at McDonald's every meal while he was in Beijing. @Allen Stark + ElaineK Thanks for sharing your experiences. A little dynamic warmup before lifting (a jog, some shoulder mobility drills, light medball work) might have a similar effect though.) I have a hip mobility circuit, shoulder mobility circuit, core circuit, and (for lack of a better word) "energizing" circuit (involves short land sprints, jumps, and whole body exercises) that I run through before every practice. Each one takes about 3 minutes, and none are fatiguing. If one must lift (for various reasons, ex not having a certain foundational level of strength, "prehab" exercises, warding off strength loss due to aging, etc) I agree with Ritter's assessment that it should come before swimming. Maximal contraction is required for improvement, and it's more difficult + more likely to result in you dropping something on your foot if you're tired from swimming beforehand. @Paul... thanks for your input! One must be wary of categorizing all dryland/weight activities under a single umbrella... I feel that the biggest role of dryland is to address the inherent muscle imbalances that result from modern-day posture realities (sitting all day) and from the anterior dominant nature of swimming (mainly using muscles on the front side of the body). This is to ward off injuries, improve posture (better boat in the water!)... For those who may have difficult given their technique achieving a certain degree of cardiovascular intensity for long periods, dryland "circuits" may enable them to keep their heartrate up better than they could in the water. However, if you do this type of training on land and then attempt to do the same thing (more cardio) in the water, clearly the first session would be more productive than the water session, and the water session would be better used doing something else (like sprint training, technique work, recovery swims, etc). I recently added yoga to my post weekend swims and it is simply magnificent. I do not consider it to be "dryland" (no fatiguing poses for me) but it has helped increase my range of motion and relax tight muscles. @Jazz Hands... I have a 24.1 50 Free from last spring. It's not spectacular, but I don't train sprint freestyle as I have externally rotated feet (duckfeet) that seriously hinder my flutter kick. A steady diet of 12 x 25 BR off the blocks 4 x a week on 1 minute has moved my 50 Br from 29.5 to 28.6. @Joshua... Thanks for your two cents! "Another point to consider is the slower recovery rate as we age. At various times I prioritize swimming or strength training, but I can't go really hard on both during the same period (add in the job factor)." Yep. Excellent consideration. Pushing on when you're physically extremely taxed isn't wise. Check out the supercompensation curve for exercise, if you keep doing down then you'll end up overtrained. "Finally, I have recently felt that improving my flexibility would be a greater contribution to my swimming and to my general well being as I age. After every swim session I do about 10 minutes of flexibility work in the pool and I am feeling alot "looser" especially in my shoulders." ElaineK's link earlier had some great stretches. Here is an active shoulder warmup routine you can run through before your swims that may help you out as well. www.udel.edu/.../Active Warmup George.pdf @Sojerz... thanks for the detailed analysis and thoughts! A slight note for your analogy... "To make the boat go faster, one increases the throttle, the engine increases in speed and the tranny then makes the propeller spin faster. The speed increases as the prop spins faster until it reaches the maximum engine speed (RPM). The boat is not going faster because the propeller is pushing the water harder, but because it's turning faster and pushing water at a higher rate. If one wants the propeller to push harder, one has to increase the diameter or reshape it to be more efficient at the desired size and RPM." As a person, you can change the shape and motion path of the propeller. Upgrading the RPMS of the engine WILL modify the shape and path of the propeller. Why? Because the brain maps movements, not muscles. (there is not "biceps" zone. But there is a "bring hand toward shoulder aka elbow flexion zone". Once again, see page 23 of the document way above, movement @ different speed is a fundamentally different pattern. "It is conceivable that some swimmers have more than enough hp (strength), and would benefit most from improving their propeller's mechanics (stroke technique). That is, if you are very strong already, you might be adding a 100 hp engine to a propeller that only needs 20 hp to spiin at the required RPMs. In this case working on a better propeller makes more sense and would be more likely to produce resuts." I don't have any studies here. But if they're anything that Terry from TI has done a great job with showing, it's that for many masters swimmers it's technique that's holding them back. This is a great comparison though. " So, does it make more sense to accomplish both of these in the pool where you can work on technique and strength or on dryland where you really can only work on strength?" In the pool you have guaranteed transfer (assuming you're going at race pace), on land you are not guaranteed to transfer the same movement patterns and energy system training, if it transfers it is via general conditioning improvement and isn't specific. "With dryland you know what you are (or aren't) doing. The workout is in-your-face and direct. In the pool it's easier to swim through a set especailly when working alone or if distracted by other stuff in your life. With dryland you can focus on your own specific muscle needs - work to balance weaknesses, stabilze shoulders, or on a too fat core. Dryland may be more efficient to get after specific difficiencies. Read the article by Ritter that Swim BRCT posted above regarding which comes first - the swimming or the lifting. I'm also wondering why Ritter found that it matters?" good point. If you're fatigued in dryland it's easier to see/feel the effects. WIth the supported and cooling nature of the water, the mechanics breakdowns that lead to slowdown are far more subtle. This is where a good coach comes into play. Why it matters? You can email chris with your specific question. However, why does it matter? If you do them in the "wrong order", they you will not get the maximum possible benefit from doing the sessions. I assume people want to be efficient with their time. @Paul Smith Again: "The studies that I saw swimBRCT quoting where done in the 90's...some relevance still I'm sure but the fact is all distances 500 and under are now so "power" driven that its hard for me to believe that supplemental weight training has not played a part" Note here that power and strength training are two different things. Not sure what previous races were if they weren't "power" (as in speed that a given force is applied) driven. There has been a shift away from the insane yardage "darwin" training of the 70s/80s to a lower yardage high intensity style training. Check out Bill Boomer's interview here regarding Dara Torres and Jason Lezak, their success has had a lot to do with not training the same way they did as age groupers. vodpod.com/.../4083819-mss-bill-boomer _whew. I Probably didn't explain as clearly as I could have, so please feel free to challenge and ask for clarification. Not trying to "convert" anyone... I guess to answer the original question, WHY are you (Lifting/drylanding), and WHAT (1 hour weight room? 30 minutes bodyweight?) are you going to be doing? Generic "get stronger" doesn't work unless you're just starting out. As I said before, for a beginner any sort of activity has the potential to be helpful.

On Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday's I lift for about 1:15 then go to the pool. I plan for my swimming workout to be fairly short and spend the 1st 500yds going slow and doing a lot of stretching. At that point I can usually do sprints but die on any distances from arm fatigue.

I do a 40 minute circuit of core / weight work 2x a week before swimming. I focus those days on drill work (both upper and lower body) and short distance intervals. I agree with bowyer954 - any distance efforts result in immediate upper body fatigue. Other than that, I swim one or two days during the week without lifting - I tend to primarily focus on 150 - 250 intervals during those workouts.

I can swim afterwards but 99% of the time the weights, when done at same time of day, are done after. Sometimes driving is difficult when done after the lift

well I am happy to say that for the first time in my life I have this opportunity. I only lift once/week and now at the same place I swim so I figure I might as well get something in while I am there even though it will take 2+ hours door to door. I swim just a few sprints fly mixed in with some easy stuff. The piano drops on my back after a 50 fly anyway so I figure thats a good bang for the buck as long as I don't blow out my shoulder.

If you can swim right after lifting then your lifting was probably a waste of time.

1st year masters 30-34 I swam 3500 yds 4 days a week maybe 1-2 days of weights my in season best 100 time was 54.17 then taper to a 53.30 2nd year masters 30-34 i swam 3000 yds 4 days a week with heavy emphasis on paddle/fin and heavvy sprinting. Did weights 3 days a week and added a spin class to mix things up and improve my legs a little. My in season 100free suffered, going a 55.5 but I had a huge taper and went 52.1 3rd year I'm a maniac!!! 3500 3-4 days a week, heavy weights 4 days a week, and I hit the spin class at least twice a week cuz i tend to hate swimming more than 5 days a week. And yoga twice a week. So far my 100 time is 54.0 but my splits are a lot mmore even than ever and my 50 time is way faster than in the past 2 years. Plus I tend to hold sets better during practice. I find it better to give myself variety so as not to get burned out or bored simply by swimming 20,000 yards a week :)

Swimming World comes down squarely in the middle: Strength Training: Before, After or Separate From Swimming for Optimal Results ... 4) Individual preference -- Some swimmers might like lifting before or after workout. There is no golden standard that fits all.