Hi
I was hoping to strenghthen my upper body as I have been working on my crawl but, although fit on land, I can not go far without having to stop in the pool. I suspect this is because my upper body is not strong enough to sustain the effort. Are free weights enough?
Thanks
You may want to consider this:
www.bodybuilding.com/.../jasonlezak1.htm
This is Jason Lezak's weight training program. The basic idea, and the one which is so different from "normal" weight programs is that it is time based. It is also a very intense program, so if you haven't been lifting a lot you should ease into it or you'll hurt yourself.
You want to train your body (and muscles) to produce power for a given amount of time. If your race lasts for 60 seconds, do the exercises for a minute each. You should be completely exhausted at the end of the set, but that is the idea -- you're getting used to the exhaustion brought on by high output. You get used to that, you can bump up the weight.
I noticed that in my 100 back I crap out doing dolphins off the last turn. I'm completely exhausted. In the weight room, I tried doing leg curls for 45 seconds and I was hurting after 30 or so -- pretty much corresponding to the second turn instead of the third. So I worked on that and I was able to carry my speed a lot better on the third wall in this last meet. I dropped just over a second from last year on my 100 back. I'm going to keep working on this, because it seemed to be effective for me.
Best of luck...
You may want to consider this:
www.bodybuilding.com/.../jasonlezak1.htm
This is Jason Lezak's weight training program. The basic idea, and the one which is so different from "normal" weight programs is that it is time based. It is also a very intense program, so if you haven't been lifting a lot you should ease into it or you'll hurt yourself.
You want to train your body (and muscles) to produce power for a given amount of time. If your race lasts for 60 seconds, do the exercises for a minute each. You should be completely exhausted at the end of the set, but that is the idea -- you're getting used to the exhaustion brought on by high output. You get used to that, you can bump up the weight.
I noticed that in my 100 back I crap out doing dolphins off the last turn. I'm completely exhausted. In the weight room, I tried doing leg curls for 45 seconds and I was hurting after 30 or so -- pretty much corresponding to the second turn instead of the third. So I worked on that and I was able to carry my speed a lot better on the third wall in this last meet. I dropped just over a second from last year on my 100 back. I'm going to keep working on this, because it seemed to be effective for me.
Best of luck...
