Hi all!
In this thread: forums.usms.org/showthread.php
...there are a lot of different opinions on how to lift weights in combination with swimming. The opinions are all spread out in between other comments and quotes so I thought I would start a separate thread about this topic as I think it might be of value for everyone to get it sorted out how and why you should lift weights in combination with swimming. If you know of another thread with exactly this topic pls let me know and i will add this comment in that thread instead.
My strong belief so far is the following (not at all stating that this is the truth, but it is the best theory I have heard so far):
You lift weights to become stronger
If you are stronger you need less % of your total capability to travel at the same speed you did before you bacame stronger.
This will lead to that you can swim at the same speed for a longer period of time OR simply do the same distance as before, but faster
This means that both sprinters and distance swimmers benefit from becoming stronger.
You don't want to build muscle mass, since that creates drag. However, for most of us this is not a problem because if you train on a regular basis in the gym, 3-4 times a week in a very focused way you might add on 0,5-1,0 kg/year....if you are under the age of 30. Above this age you tend to add on much less if anything at all.:cane:
You become stronger by lifting heavy weights. High reps does not make you stronger, it increases your endurance capabilies. Endurance you typically practice in the pool. I therefore focus on sets of 3-6 reps with heavy weights. The next week I focus on fast movements (beacasue heavy lifting is often a rather slow movement), reducing the weights to 60-70% of max to practice fast movements under pressure (like swimming, but to the extreme). The week after that is for high reps letting the muscles rest a bit but dont let them rest completely....then I start all over again.
I typically focus on basic exercises like: squats, dead lifts, bench presses, chins and a variety of stomach and lower back exercisesVery interested to hear your opinions of the above and also your own experiences.
/Per
Of course, all other things will not be equal. The more you train for endurance, the harder it will be to maintain a large amount of muscle. The two just don't go together well, because each one demands a very large amount of energy. Just as it takes a lot of time and energy to build a good aerobic base for the longer events, it takes a lot of time and energy to build a strength base. Could both be achieved in the same person?
Not by your average masters swimmer with time constraints!
I've often heard endurance kills speed.
I think strength is indisputably important for sprinting. I attribute some of my relative success at sprinting to strength and power. I used to lift moderate weights. In the last 7-8 months or so, I've shifted more into light weights and more core work. We'll see how it works out at my next meet ... I do have this notion, don't know whether it's valid or not, that further time reductions in my sprints will require more strength. However, I am not going down that route, as I'm already buff and don't care for more. So I'm personally hoping Mr. Smith is right. (Except that pilates and yoga will not be making an appearance in my life! I need to run for some modest aerobic work.)
I also believe more women should lift weights. Many women don't lift weights and bemoan their inability to sprint. Hours in the pool is great for 200+ events, not so great for sprints. Strength, whether inherent or obtained in the weight room, has to help. I'm sure increased inflexibility would too though.
Lifting heavy weights build muscle mass, too much and you'll start to lose buoyancy and flexbility, and it's no good at all to swim.
A heavier musclular arm can be more powerfull but it'll consume more energy to move, and over a certain limit it'll start to be slower when you move it, so the net result cannot be a better swimming arm.
Tonic muscles can help maybe better looking at the elite swimmers.
The key is to optimize every part of the body, and for sure there' re a lot of way to reach that.
in 100m free LCM :
The reign WC is Magnini, 6'1, 165lbs, sleek, atletic but nothing to write home about impressive muscles.
Remember Popov, even less impressive but one of best of all times.
Look at Lezak with his heavy, muscular body, have won nearly nothing outside USA, wipe out in the second 50s in last fews International Competitions.
Look at the Womens.
Most of them set yours PB when teanagers, lifting nothing at all.
So lifting heavy weights a lot of times look to not be the way to go, a tonic full body is for a lot of elite swimmers the key to great performances.
Pilates, yoga, Full Body workouts together with stretching look to be more usefull that simply lift heavy weight for most of time IMHO.
Absolutely agree with everything above...particularly when talking about masters.
Here's the deal folks...forget about weights...if you REALLY want to make a significant break through in your swimming relative to competition stop swimming for 4-8 weeks and go to kick only workouts...as you ease back into swimming you will have the opportunity to "learn" how to integrate a new and powerful element to your stroke...something that 90% of the swimmers I see competing do not do well....
Take a closer look sometime and it will blow your mind....the vast majority of swimmers who are the best "kickers" in practice usually cannot use that skill/strength in a race......
Strength, whether inherent or obtained in the weight room, has to help. I'm sure increased inflexibility would too though.
Personally I'm trying that "increased inflexibility" route :)
I really think the bottom line is there's more than one way to train that's effective. You can swim fast by never lifting a weight, you can swim fast by lifting weights a lot. If you're doing something that seems to be providing results for you then stick with it.
Pilates and yoga? Are you kidding me? I couldn't say anything about distance events, but I dropped an easy one second in the 50 free in a year by putting on 30 pounds of muscle, when nothing else had worked for a long time.
I've said :"So lifting heavy weights a lot of times..."
Not "Lifting heavy weight, period"
I suppose that nearly every Olympic swimmer workout at gym lifting heavy weight over the season but this don't look to be the main part of their dryland training, otherwise we'll see a lot of Elite swimmers bulky as a 220 lbs bodybuilder in every gym around the world.
A weak arm is as bad as the arm of Mr Olimpia for swimming, something in between maximize the performance, so if you've a weak arm, out of sharpe, and start to lift weight, sure you'll get better time, but even pilates, yoga, full body and so on help you to get better time, but if your arm have good strength and endurance but you've weak core body strength, abs and hip for examples, lifting heavy weight most of time can't help you as pilates, yoga.
Everybody is different, better for you that with 30 pounds of muscles you've lower your 50 times, maybe you was a little overweight too.
The rotation in freestyle start from the hip or from the shoulders ?
and Pilates what is it about ?
so I'm not kidding you.
Interesting post. I think that the potential size of a given muscle is tied primarily to genetics. You can stress the muscle to get bigger, but at a certain point, it will cease to grow in size. It can, however, still get stronger. When powerlifting, I could shrug 675lbs for reps in good form. But I never grew monster traps that I'd see on some guys who'd struggle with 315. I also knew a kid who could bench 225 for 15 reps, but his arms might have been 14 inches and he was pretty skinny.
So if lifting weights helps make you faster, do it (this goes for the ladies as well…got my wife to bench 135 for a couple of reps, and she still looked feminine). You'll only grow to a certain point, then you'll just get stronger.
I personally have been experimenting with olympic lifting and plyometrics to assist in my sprinting. May have to try the yoga stuff as well, who knows?
I also have to wonder about the kicking component. I swam a long course 100m freestyle earlier this summer and video taped it. I had the opportunity to swim against a college swimmer who had qualified for the olympic time trials next year. What I noticed was that he had a monster kick, compared to my slow-motion flutter. His game was a little off in that he only swam a :53.01. He spanked me pretty hard, but for what it's worth, I'm sure I could out bench him :thhbbb:
In any event, I have focused more on kicking so we'll see. Ultimately, do what works best for you and be willing to try new things. Guess I'm done rambling.
I've said :"So lifting heavy weights a lot of times..."
Not "Lifting heavy weight, period"
I suppose that nearly every Olympic swimmer workout at gym lifting heavy weight over the season but this don't look to be the main part of their dryland training, otherwise we'll see a lot of Elite swimmers bulky as a 220 lbs bodybuilder in every gym around the world.
A weak arm is as bad as the arm of Mr Olimpia for swimming, something in between maximize the performance, so if you've a weak arm, out of sharpe, and start to lift weight, sure you'll get better time, but even pilates, yoga, full body and so on help you to get better time, but if your arm have good strength and endurance but you've weak core body strength, abs and hip for examples, lifting heavy weight most of time can't help you as pilates, yoga.
Everybody is different, better for you that with 30 pounds of muscles you've lower your 50 times, maybe you was a little overweight too.
The rotation in freestyle start from the hip or from the shoulders ?
and Pilates what is it about ?
so I'm not kidding you.
You can make as many assertions as you want, but in my experience with different types of dryland training, "core rotation" stuff doesn't work, and heavy weight training does work for producing swimming speed. The difference is so dramatic it blew me away. When I heard that I split 20.9 on a relay, I thought somebody had read the scoreboard wrong. After several years of hard swimming and orthodox dryland training (always with a focus on my "core!"), I had resigned myself to the fact that I just didn't swim faster than 22 seconds. It seemed impossible.
But it was entirely logical. All motions in swimming are created by forceful contraction of skeletal muscle. Larger muscles are capable of producing greater forces. It couldn't be any simpler, and yet so many people here insist that being "too bulky" is a legitimate danger for most swimmers.
One more thing. My core is a lot stronger now than it ever was when my dryland training was supposedly focused on it. If you really want to know how strong your hips are, go see how much you can deadlift.
Lifting heavy weights build muscle mass, too much and you'll start to lose buoyancy and flexbility, and it's no good at all to swim.
A heavier musclular arm can be more powerfull but it'll consume more energy to move, and over a certain limit it'll start to be slower when you move it, so the net result cannot be a better swimming arm.
Tonic muscles can help maybe better looking at the elite swimmers.
The key is to optimize every part of the body, and for sure there' re a lot of way to reach that.
in 100m free LCM :
The reign WC is Magnini, 6'1, 165lbs, sleek, atletic but nothing to write home about impressive muscles.
Remember Popov, even less impressive but one of best of all times.
Look at Lezak with his heavy, muscular body, have won nearly nothing outside USA, wipe out in the second 50s in last fews International Competitions.
Look at the Womens.
Most of them set yours PB when teanagers, lifting nothing at all.
So lifting heavy weights a lot of times look to not be the way to go, a tonic full body is for a lot of elite swimmers the key to great performances.
Pilates, yoga, Full Body workouts together with stretching look to be more usefull that simply lift heavy weight for most of time IMHO.
However, Jazz Hands, you're concentrating on the 50 free. Do you think heavy lifting would be as great a benefit for longer distances? I tend to think not. The 50 requires power. The tradeoff of power vs. aerobic fitness comes into play for anything greater than a 50.
It's an interesting question. Not so interesting that I would put myself through the pain of training for longer races to find out the answer, but interesting.
Greater relative strength is always a good thing. Let's say you produce 80 PowerUnits in the water during a sprint, but you can only produce 40 PowerUnits in a longer race. You could say that your strength in the longer race is half of your sprinting strength. If you build up your strength to the point where you produce 120 PowerUnits in a sprint, you could then maintain 60 PowerUnits in the longer race if all other things are equal.
Of course, all other things will not be equal. The more you train for endurance, the harder it will be to maintain a large amount of muscle. The two just don't go together well, because each one demands a very large amount of energy. Just as it takes a lot of time and energy to build a good aerobic base for the longer events, it takes a lot of time and energy to build a strength base. Could both be achieved in the same person?
jazz, a few things:
1) Your postings come across as very ?my way or the highway"....given the quality of the coaches and swimmers on this forum you a re doing yourself a disservice with this approach....
Don't care. If you choose to engage me in an intelligent discussion of training methods, I'll be glad to go along. If you want to broadly contradict my points without presenting any real argument, you're on your own.
Compare, in general, the two opposing arguments here.
I say: Muscles are the system in the body that universally provides strength. Bigger muscles are stronger muscles. Therefore it should be beneficial for swimming strength to have relatively big muscles. My personal experience supports this.
You say: Look how fast Nick Brunelli is.
2) Because it worked for you is great and dropping to 21.5 is great...but the reason I ask is to put in perspective where you are coming from. I did not bring up Nick to put you down, I brought up Nick to show that one of the top sprinters in the world today is finding that he is having incredible success doing the exact opposite of you.
It doesn't surprise me that naturally fast swimers who practice swimming fast will have success in swimming. I'm more interested in how to train optimally. Just because someone is the best swimmer in the world doesn't necessarily mean they are the best possible swimmer, or even close.
3) So what are your 100 and 200 times? Sure added bulk and stength to a young (I'm guessing your early 20's, correct me if I'm wrong?) may allow you to muscle through a 50 (in a time that is good, but doesn't make finals cuts in most high school 5A 50 free races and would be a stretch for Top 10 masters in your age group). point being is bulk/strength to someone that never had it before is fine...but won't take you to an elite level.
I'll turn 22 next month. I don't think 21.5 is very fast. I want to be faster, but I have some obstacles, like the fact that I can't ever practice starts. I've put on some muscle since that meet, and I've been refining my sprint technique. We'll see how it goes in Austin.
By the way, thanks for insulting my swimming accomplishments again. It might be hard for someone like yourself to understand, but some people are not gigantically tall natural swimmers. I had to work to get down to 22.1, and I was very proud when I did it. I was also proud of my 49.2 in the 100. Do you want to make fun of that, too? For several years, 22 seconds was like a wall for me. Strength training got me through the wall. Why does it matter what level of competition it happened at?
4) Your comments to me about muscle strength relative to core strength, balance, etc. are simply incorrect. Sure muscle plays a very bug part...swimmers in both USS and masters that make it through to the top tier are foregoing brute strnegth training for more subtle gains from core training often achieved through things like yoga and pilates...which you laugh off.
Again, you are not providing any physiological perspective on how one gains strength, subtle or brutal, independent of muscle mass. I'll tell you right now that strength is also related to skill-specific adaptations in the nervous system, but I don't think you care. You're just being lazy in your thought process.
Try being a bit more humble and maybe opening your own mind to what some here on this forum have figured out after having done not just what you are just dicsonvering at a yound age..but a lot of differnt traning techniques over mny, many yeas.
Funny how I'm discovering something at a young age that you apparently never discovered in your many years of training.
Lifting heavy weights build muscle mass, too much and you'll start to lose buoyancy and flexbility, and it's no good at all to swim.
A heavier musclular arm can be more powerfull but it'll consume more energy to move, and over a certain limit it'll start to be slower when you move it, so the net result cannot be a better swimming arm.
Tonic muscles can help maybe better looking at the elite swimmers.
The key is to optimize every part of the body, and for sure there' re a lot of way to reach that.
in 100m free LCM :
The reign WC is Magnini, 6'1, 165lbs, sleek, atletic but nothing to write home about impressive muscles.
Remember Popov, even less impressive but one of best of all times.
Look at Lezak with his heavy, muscular body, have won nearly nothing outside USA, wipe out in the second 50s in last fews International Competitions.
Look at the Womens.
Most of them set yours PB when teanagers, lifting nothing at all.
So lifting heavy weights a lot of times look to not be the way to go, a tonic full body is for a lot of elite swimmers the key to great performances.
Pilates, yoga, Full Body workouts together with stretching look to be more usefull that simply lift heavy weight for most of time IMHO.
Pilates and yoga? Are you kidding me? I couldn't say anything about distance events, but I dropped an easy one second in the 50 free in a year by putting on 30 pounds of muscle, when nothing else had worked for a long time.
