To be honest I'm more of a fan of free sitting and extreme sleeping.
And when I blow my nose, I blow my nose HARD.
I find all this helps, though I'm not quite sure how.
It definitely looks cool if you're good at it, but let's face it, you're going to get hurt doing it. That's fine, but probably doesn't make it the best cross-training activity if you compete in another sport.
I love extreme sleeping. :snore: I'm in training right now
I joined the forum at a parkour website and asked pretty much the same question and people have said, as long as I do it right and don't push my boundaires too much in the beginning, then you really don't get hurt that often. So basically, I can't scale buildings right away...bummer.
Follow my logic here:
Ankle flexibility is tantamount in swimming.
Ankle flexibility is based on bone structure and is not something you can really improve.
Sports like basketball and running (not even going to mention parkour) damage your ankle bone structure because of they are high-impact in that area.
Thus those sports are not good cross-training if you your goal is to swim fast.
(Though doing somthing would be better than doing nothing)
I think that finding new and interesting ways to develop your strength can be beneficial to your swimming. It keeps you excited and working hard.
I spent many years lifting weights as a supplement to swimming. The thing is that after many months in the weight room the routine gets stale, you matter how much you switch it up. You go through the motions and you aren't pushing yourself as hard as time goes by. You get to a point where you just maintain. It gets old... After a long time of working muscles in isolation I just begin to wonder whether I can really transfer that strength into something useful. In reality you are never really trying to do things by only using one muscle at a time.
More recently I have been looking to find other ways of developing strength and power out of the water. I saw a link to CrossFit posted here awhile back and that gave me some new ideas to try out. Olympic style lifting works a lot of muscles together and it applies strength a power to more realistic tasks. However after awhile it got a bit old and repetitive.
I like learning new things, new tricks. I was very into gymnastics at a young age so I decided I wanted to attempt to resurrect that a little bit. Gymnastics is a great way to develop strength and power. There are always new things to learn and it teaches you to work lots of muscles together. I discovered that a couple local gymnasiums had adult classes at night. Last night I tried it for the first time and now I want to keep it up. Perhaps that could be an interesting alternative to parkour. It is really nice when you have lots of squishy mats to land on.
To be honest I'm more of a fan of free sitting and extreme sleeping.
I was too, then I had a baby. She really cut in to my training time - I've given up extreme sleep for now :p
