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
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.
A bit of a hijack, and this is just my opinion...but I think the best thing for working on the kicks off the last turn is to do race-pace intensity swimming/kicking in practice. A lot of people do fast 25s & 50s underwater kicking, far fewer do 75s and 100s at the same intensity, with 12+ kicks off each wall. (And for good reason: they are pretty painful.)
Also: do you really find there is a strong correlation between leg curls and underwater dolphin? Leg extensions and squats seem to work better for me.
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.
A bit of a hijack, and this is just my opinion...but I think the best thing for working on the kicks off the last turn is to do race-pace intensity swimming/kicking in practice. A lot of people do fast 25s & 50s underwater kicking, far fewer do 75s and 100s at the same intensity, with 12+ kicks off each wall. (And for good reason: they are pretty painful.)
Also: do you really find there is a strong correlation between leg curls and underwater dolphin? Leg extensions and squats seem to work better for me.
