Strength / Land work for swimmers

On a basic level, you can suffer from different types of overtraining, mainly they are split into local and peripheral. Local is as the name suggests, restricted to muscles or muscle groups and doesn't effect other bodily systems. Peripheral involves more than the muscles, including the neuromuscular system, and cardiovascular system, and sufferers complain of feelings similar to people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. All of my training is related to my overtraining syndrome, that is land work, pool work and weight training. I have begun to build up my training gradually starting with pool work now, and beginning to introduce land work (hence my question). In the past, it is weight training which has led to me breaking down the muscle tissue quickest and also fatiguing the nervous system. We have found that my body takes longer to recover from weight training than any other type of training (I don't know if other people have found this, but I personally "suffer" more from fatigue after this sort of training). Therefore we are postponing adding this into my programme until I can cope with the workload in the pool and a simple strength session. When I say weight training is damaging to the neuromuscular system I mean in the way that all sports training is "damaging" to the body, i.e. you break down tissue to have it built back stronger. Therefore its not necessarily a "risk" as such. Weight training is particularly taxing so therefore to prevent a relapse it seems sensible to hold back in this area. I know that a number of coaches use reaction time drills to test their swimmers recovery from hard sessions, including US coach Sam Freas. This is down to the link between overtraining and the neuromuscular system. There are a lot of articles on the internet on overtraining syndrome. Unfortunately, there is no set recovery rate or testing procedure so it is difficult to know whether you are over it or not. I know the past 6 months have been the most frustrating of my swimming career, especially as all the work I did (which probably caused the fatigue!) has not produced the great performances that it suggested at the time! Here are some good articles : www.highnrg.com/.../1200article.htm www.elitetrack.com/neuromuscularfatigue.pdf ed-web3.educ.msu.edu/.../chronic_fatigue_syndrome.htm :DHope this answers your questions and apologies if my last post was confusing!!!

On a basic level, you can suffer from different types of overtraining, mainly they are split into local and peripheral. Local is as the name suggests, restricted to muscles or muscle groups and doesn't effect other bodily systems. Peripheral involves more than the muscles, including the neuromuscular system, and cardiovascular system, and sufferers complain of feelings similar to people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. All of my training is related to my overtraining syndrome, that is land work, pool work and weight training. I have begun to build up my training gradually starting with pool work now, and beginning to introduce land work (hence my question). In the past, it is weight training which has led to me breaking down the muscle tissue quickest and also fatiguing the nervous system. We have found that my body takes longer to recover from weight training than any other type of training (I don't know if other people have found this, but I personally "suffer" more from fatigue after this sort of training). Therefore we are postponing adding this into my programme until I can cope with the workload in the pool and a simple strength session. When I say weight training is damaging to the neuromuscular system I mean in the way that all sports training is "damaging" to the body, i.e. you break down tissue to have it built back stronger. Therefore its not necessarily a "risk" as such. Weight training is particularly taxing so therefore to prevent a relapse it seems sensible to hold back in this area. I know that a number of coaches use reaction time drills to test their swimmers recovery from hard sessions, including US coach Sam Freas. This is down to the link between overtraining and the neuromuscular system. There are a lot of articles on the internet on overtraining syndrome. Unfortunately, there is no set recovery rate or testing procedure so it is difficult to know whether you are over it or not. I know the past 6 months have been the most frustrating of my swimming career, especially as all the work I did (which probably caused the fatigue!) has not produced the great performances that it suggested at the time! Here are some good articles : www.highnrg.com/.../1200article.htm www.elitetrack.com/neuromuscularfatigue.pdf ed-web3.educ.msu.edu/.../chronic_fatigue_syndrome.htm :DHope this answers your questions and apologies if my last post was confusing!!!