Affect of 15% weight reduction on speed

Tip 08 is Lug Less Lard Tip 165 Build a Better Boat there's many factors that contribute to time improvements if a swimmer is over weight they'll greatly benefit from losing weight but it's important to maintain strength and conditioning while losing weight Eddie Reese talks about how large of a cross section a swimmer has to drag through the water. If you read through my blog you'll see one season I went from 215 ish to 199 but I swam faster when I lifted weights and did sprints before 2008 masters nationals

Less mass to move during acceleration (starts and turns), less drag. You ought to swim faster, unless you also lost a lot of muscle. I won't guess a percentage. The only possible downside is that fat floats.

I was a very fit & fat swimmer for years. I dropped from 225 to 185 and noticed NO increase in speed with equal amounts of training. However, as Geek indicated above for himself, once I learned how to swim (this is true even though I competed in college 50 years ago) and started training better I got faster. I probably won't intentionally regain the weight but I think the weight loss among really fit people is overrated (much like Jim's statement for the high tech suits). And there are a few recent medical studies to back up my point. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Besides all the witnesses have been moved to other locations.

Hi all - I have an odd post for you to ponder :) Recently I've decided enough is enough and it's time to shift some unwanted poundage. Over the past few months through exercise and eating much better I've dropped about 15% of my original body weight, going from 207lbs to 175lbs. At the same time I've been swimming a bit and making an effort to keep on some muscle too. I know it's a very very hard question to answer but am looking for people's estimates on what this sort of weight loss would do to your swimming time over longer distances if I was able to keep everything else static (stroke, flexibility, strengtht etc). The only difference if possible would be there would be less body weight, and hopefully a better shape for moving through the water. I know that due to water being denser it's not as easy to say as it would be in relation to running etc, but say over a 5km open water swim, what would people guess the % improvement would be as a result of this? Cheers GC I don't know that one can put a percentage on improvement due to weight loss because so many factors come into play when weight loss occurs such as good nutrition and low stress outside of the pool. Perhaps these things might have come about without a weight drop and one would see an improvement. When talking about strength being static, did you start your weight lifting when you started losing weight or had you been lifting weights for a bit of time? If you had been lifting regularly before you started losing weight, were you able to maintain the same amount of strength? Also, much depends on your height and your build. I've always heard that generally, a woman should take 100 pounds and add 5 pounds for each inch she is over five feet. For example, a woman who is 5'8" should generally weigh around 140 (100 + (8 x 5) = 140). For men, I've heard it to be generally 100 pounds and add 6.5 pounds for each inch over five feet. So, without knowing your height, I wouldn't know if weighing 175 is a good weight for you in which you would see improvement or if you have gotten a little thin and perhaps lost your power. If you are 5'11" and male, I would imagine that you would see an improvement in your swimming times. If on the other hand, you are 6'5", I would imagine that your times might actually suffer. I learned the hard way in high school that what works well for distance running does not work for well for swimming. My junior year of high school, at 5'9", I weighed 128, down from my weight of 140 as a sophmore. My running times were my best that year, never to be matched again, but my swimming times suffered terribly, including my 200 and 500 free. Except for CreamPuff, most ultradistance swimmers I've known are not usually skinny. So, I'm not sure a weight loss assessment is applicable like it is in running ( In running, each pound lost is supposed to result in a 3 second improvement per mile). Good luck to you!! I hope you achieve the goals you have set your heart on. Sometimes I think motivation and desire are more important than any amount of weight loss.

This is interesting to me. I've been swimming a ton, doing bands, and "other" dryland activities. I'm fitting into HS jeans again! Those haven't fit since 1999! And I haven't lost an ounce although I know I've lost a lot of inches. I know I still need to lose about 20 pounds (of fat, I would guess, it's mostly in the middle), but I still struggle with what the scale says. I don't like the number. So even though I'm much stronger and swimming well, that rotten scale "shows" no improvement.

USA Swimming has an interesting round up of some of the studies on this topic. www.usaswimming.org/.../ViewMiscArticle.aspx I will excerpt on these, which may every so gingerly explain why skinny CremePuff's recent 24.99 in the 50 SCY freestyle may have depended more on her svelteness, and Jim Clemmon's recent No. 1 in the World times may have depended more on his B70... 4. Sprint performance may be affected more in females than in males. Siders, W.A., H.C. Lukaski and W.W. Bolonchuk. (1993). Relationships among swimming performance, body composition and somatotype in competitive collegiate swimmers. Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness 33:166-171. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between body composition and sprint swimming performance. Seventy-four collegiate-level male and female sprinters were weighed underwater and tested on a single 100-y time trial of the swimmer’s main competitive stroke. Results Sprint performance was significantly related to height, weight in water, fat-free weight and body fatness in females. The taller, heavier in water, the more fat-free tissue and the less body fat (within 25+5.3%), the faster they swam. These trends were also present for the males (¿=14.1+2.9%), but the relationships were not significant. Implications Percent body fat can impact performance, but it doesn’t have to be extremely low for a swimmer to perform well. The effects of body composition changes on sprint performance may be more pronounced in females than in males. One final thought: a couple years ago, I lost a significant amount of weight (from 180 to 159; I am 6' 1") and it didn't seem to correlate with any improvements in my swimming (though I did seem to bonk from exercise induced hypglycemia more often at practice.) My friend Glenn Battle, who has multiple Top 10 times and one No. 1 time sometime in yesteryear, told me that he has tried losing weight in the hopes of seeing improvements in his swimming times, and he has seen no effect, positive or negative. Neither of us were obese or even borderline overweight to begin with, so perhaps this small sample of two doesn't add anything useful to the discussion. My sense, however, is that there are probably some people who will be helped by losing weight, some that will be hurt, and many who will see no significant change. As the above study indicates, there may also be a gender effect whereby women conceivably benefit from weight losss more than men. As many have already noted, land sports exert a toll of gravity upon their participants from which we swimmers are largely exculpated. It is, like golfing on the moon, a very forgiving sport in at least this one sense.

it totally depends on the clothing brand, but someone with those measurements today would wear somewhere between a 4 and a 6. Over the years clothing manufacturers, catering to women's tendency to want to be smaller, started changing the sizing on their garments. This practice is called "vanity sizing" and lets a large-ish woman claim that she wears a size 10. THis practice has led to preposterous sizing at the lower end of the scale. Sizes for the truly tiny are now 0 and 00. People haven;t gotten smaller over the years, yet now we have size 0 and 00 where they never existed before just because the upper-end numbers are now labeled with lower size designations. While MM's weight fluctuated widely, one look at her pics will show that there's no way that woman was EVER a "Modern" size 12. Even I don't wear that size, and at 5'5 and 150 pounds, I'm no Marilyn Monroe!

get what people are saying - to be honest I didn't plan to loose weight just happened as result of food intolerance diets to isolate problem etc. Totally agree best plan is simultaneously eat well and exercise more. However, back to the original item - I still think if you could keep everything constant (and again i know it's hard to ensure this), how weighing less wouldn't lead to an increase in speed. I know the gains won't be as obvious as they are with running, where if you weigh 12 stonne you are making 12 stonne run, as in water the buoyancy and density affects this and it isn't 1 to 1 anymore. I think for the most part people are saying the same - that things change, but that weighing a bit less should help the swimming speed if I can keep the strength and stroke going. Again thank you all for the comments and replies - am blown away by the amount of them! Thanks

I know I still need to lose about 20 pounds (of fat, I would guess, it's mostly in the middle), but I still struggle with what the scale says. I don't like the number. So even though I'm much stronger and swimming well, that rotten scale "shows" no improvement. Don't fall into that trap. It's just a number!!!!! It's only one part of your over all fitness.

One final thought: a couple years ago, I lost a significant amount of weight (from 180 to 159; I am 6' 1") and it didn't seem to correlate with any improvements in my swimming (though I did seem to bonk from exercise induced hypglycemia more often at practice.) This is something that I had also noticed in my other sport - cross country ski racing. This is a high endurance activity and I noticed a couple of years ago that I started to bonk in 10 K races (30-40 minutes) and often couldn't frinish the 25 & 50 K races. This was never a problem when I weighed over 200 lbs but became one for weights below that level. I was really puzzled until I realized that I was no longer carrying around the food stores needed for races of 40 min to 4 hours in duration. I have now figured out how to compensate for the food shortage but it was pretty discouraging for a while. Especially after all the hype from the weight-loss ***...