I'm a rookie in the pool, and am surprised that keeping one's weight down appears to be less important than I thought. After decades of running with the knowledge that every pound over my running weight added 20 secs to my p/m pace, am I ok being a little chunky? I do aspire to be competitive in my age class. Thanks, Steve
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Carry a surfboard into the ocean, then paddle out. Huge weight difference, but you should be able to paddle yourself on that big heavy surfboard pretty fast.
Swimming is more about drag and thus surface area when it comes to buoyant materials. Weight matters, but not as much as being shaped like a cube vs a speed boat.
I am really just disagreeing with the use of HUGE :)
To add a little to this, the relevant equation is F=ma. Holding force (net force, or propulsion minus drag) constant, acceleration is inversely related to mass. Swimming is a series of accelerations and decelerations. If I remember the graphs from Maglischo, velocity versus time is wavy. During acceleration, the goal is to get up to a higher speed more quickly while propulsion is greater than drag, so in this phase greater mass will be a hindrance. But during deceleration, the goal is to hold on to speed while drag is greater than propulsion. In this case, you actually want to be heavier, because that makes the net drag force work harder to slow you down. I don't really want to get into the calculus enough to prove this (read: I'm not that good at calculus), but I'm pretty sure it's a wash overall.
Carry a surfboard into the ocean, then paddle out. Huge weight difference, but you should be able to paddle yourself on that big heavy surfboard pretty fast.
Swimming is more about drag and thus surface area when it comes to buoyant materials. Weight matters, but not as much as being shaped like a cube vs a speed boat.
I am really just disagreeing with the use of HUGE :)
To add a little to this, the relevant equation is F=ma. Holding force (net force, or propulsion minus drag) constant, acceleration is inversely related to mass. Swimming is a series of accelerations and decelerations. If I remember the graphs from Maglischo, velocity versus time is wavy. During acceleration, the goal is to get up to a higher speed more quickly while propulsion is greater than drag, so in this phase greater mass will be a hindrance. But during deceleration, the goal is to hold on to speed while drag is greater than propulsion. In this case, you actually want to be heavier, because that makes the net drag force work harder to slow you down. I don't really want to get into the calculus enough to prove this (read: I'm not that good at calculus), but I'm pretty sure it's a wash overall.
