Dry land training

We don't have an official dry land masters session but a number of our team do weights together. I do three weights workouts each week, tuesday, thursday and Saturday. Typically I do weights for 45minutes followed by 15 minutes on the Vasa swim trainer: vasatrainer.com/vasa-trainer.html Our facility is very modern and has weight machines, free weights, running machines, elliptical machines and vasa trainers. My coach likes us to do circuits with little to no rest between reps and circuits, so it's a continuous 45 Min workout. We will select a group of exercises and do 3 circuits, with 10 reps per machine on circuit1, 8 reps on circuit2 and 6 reps on circuit3. Circuit 1 we do 80% of max, circuit2 is max weight and circuit3 is fail. Once you can make your weight on circuit3 this becomes your new weight on circuit2. Typical exercises include some combination of, bench press, inclined bench press, military press, leg press, leg curls, leg extensions, lat pull down, seated rows, lunges, squats, pull ups, medicine ball, sit ups, lower back extension. When we first did this I did very little weight and over a month or so built up so I feel comfortable on all the machines knowing what I should do and how much weight I should lift. My goal is strength enduarnce but their is a big aerobic piece to this due to the fact that we take no rest. I hope this helps.

Hi Kari! Our team doesn't have organized team practices, we are more of a virtual team training independently and coming together for meets. So I started incorporating some basic drylands as well as stretching back in the summer and have been slowly adding to it, sometimes incorporating the exercises in the USMS Swimmer magazines. Usually I rotate through the same floor exercises and it includes a mixture of abs, push ups, flutter kicks, back raises, 70 second plank, 30 second side planks. Then I do about 4 exercises on my stability ball and finish up with 5 (3x10 reps) stretch cord exercises. The stretch cords I think are really important in my upper body strength since I do not have a gym to do weight-lifting. I use the medium (blue) resistance cords that I bought at Target but Theraband has a large selection. I recommend checking out the USA Swimming website's Strength and Conditioning videos under the Tips and Training tab to help you create your dryland regimen.www.usaswimming.org/DesktopDefault.aspx

Look into Olympic style weightlifting....I started a year ago and the gains in strength have been fantastic. I started swimming after taking the summer off to exclusively weight train and came back faster than ever.

Look into Olympic style weightlifting. Where does one look for more information about that style of lifting?

Both bench press and dips aggravate my shoulder joints and muscle tendons. In fact the only way I can safely apply pectoral strength training is with underhand benching, everything else does not agree. This is also due to years of wear and injuries though

Where does one look for more information about that style of lifting? I also recommend a routine based around the olympic barbell plus dips and pullups. I did this in preparation for a meet in 2012 and went 4 lifetime best times. The best resource is probably the book "Starting Strength". It goes into tedious detail on how to safely do all the lifts with lots of pictures. A similar program is Stronglifts which is pretty much a copy of the program in Starting Strength but doing (pendlay) rows instead of power cleans. Rows are good for swimming I think as they help strengthen lats but you might want to also do cleans. The only modifications to the above programs is you might want to do is skip bench press or be careful with it as it can be hard on a swimmer's shoulders (do dips instead) and add pull ups. If you want more motivation to try a program like this, you should read this: www.mensjournal.com/.../everything-you-know-about-fitness-is-a-lie-20120504

There are some great ideas in here, thanks! It gives me some new things to try. Those guys on the team are going down!! (sometime...) Hee hee!

If your shoulders are a little suspect forget the bench press...compensate by building better wheels..kick workouts, and squats and other leg work. My shoulders used to give me fits after a lot of yardage and weights so I decided to really train my legs and guess what? My 50 and 100 times dropped..LEGS ARE KEY!!!!