My great friend, the charming ignoramus Leslie "the Fortess" Livingston, and I recently had the opportunity to bandy about a debate topic in the November issue of Swimmer magazine.
Leslie has asked me to create a poll to see which of us had the more persuasive arguments vis a vis the usefulness of weight lifting to behoove swimming performance.
I tried to talk Leslie out of such a poll, because I wasn't sure her delicate albeit manly temperament could take the likely beat down she would get, vote wise.
After all, her teenage daughter had already proclaimed, in uncertain terms, that she was best off pleading Nolo contendere here (see en.wikipedia.org/.../Nolo_contendere if your legal skills are as atrophied as Leslie's). In her daughter's own words, "He totally owned you, Mom! Like totally! It was so awesome! He's so totally funny, and you are so totally uptight, Mom! I mean, it was like so totally embarrassing how much he owned you! Please tell me I'm adopted! Please tell me Jim Thornton is my real mother!"
Unfortunately, this kind of advanced rhetorical argument on my part fell on deaf ears, just as my advanced rhetorical argument--in which actual studies were cited!--also fell on deaf ears. Evidently, the dear girl has overdone the neck thickening machine, and in the process, mastoid muscle processes seem to have overgrown her ear canals!
I know that not everyone has received their copy of Swimmer yet. Rumor has it that those of us who live in the higher class zip codes get the extra virgin pressed copies, with the rest of you having to wait to the ink starts getting stale.
You will get your copies one day, I assure you! Just as you will get your H1N1 swine flu vaccines dosages when me and my friends at Goldman have had our third inoculations!
But I am getting a bit off the track here.
If you've read our Inane Point (Leslie) - Brilliant Counterpoint (Jim) *** for tat debate, Leslie asks that you vote in this poll for the person you think was RHETORICALLY superior.
Note: this does not mean which of us was right.
Hell, I have already conceded Leslie was right, and have begun weight lifting myself thrice weekly!
I am one bulked up monstrosity of a girly man at this point, and I don't plan to stop till you can bounce quarters off my moobs.
So. Forget all aspects of actual rational correctness here, and certainly forget all aspects of who is more popular.
And vote with your pitiless inner rhetoritician calling the shots.
Leslie, I warned you: Nolo contendere was the smart plea. But no, you just wouldn't hear of it!
Former Member
I don't understand: If swimming makes you a stronger person, wouldn't being a stronger person make you a better swimmer?
People in every other sport benefit from weight training, including ones like baseball and golf where being overmuscled was seen as a disadvantage. Why would swimming be different?
Don't pretend to have the answers, but to me these seem to be the important questions.
After several years of no improvement, I got a ton faster when I started lifting. This happened over several years (not, I might note, any amount of time that one of these studies has even come close to covering).
I tend to agree with you that the full benefit of lifting may take years to accrue. (Since I haven't been able to hit the gym the past few months as much as I would like, I hope the opposite is true too...that the benfits are slow to fade.:)) That sort of thing is, of course, much harder -- and more expensive -- to study.
But I will point out that an abrupt shift in training routine is sometimes a good way to jolt someone who has hit a plateau. It might not have been only the weight-lifting in your case, but that you were stuck in a rut.
Who knows, at some point in the future you might find the same thing happening and break out of it by cutting back on lifting (or at least changing it) while increasing pool time.
One of the nice things of masters swimming, I think, is that we have the time and inclination to try new things. It isn't a big deal to have a season that is a little off; there are (hopefully) plenty more to come. In fact, it might not be a bad thing to use the last 1-2 years at the "top" of an age group to try a new training routine and see how it works.
I feel like Henry Fonda in that jury movie where everyone was ready to hang somebody, except heroic Jim Fonda refused to waver.
When this poll first started, the Weight Lifting Doesn't Help Swimming Performance percentage was in the low 20 percent range.
But then heroic Jim Fonda, in his very reasonable and steady way, began to make points against the hot heads.
Now, the percentage has climbed to over 30 percent!
If only there was someway that people could go back and manually reverse their earlier, ill-considered votes!
Jim Fonda is holding out for an acquittal! The truth will eventually be set free, and the firey rabble shall slink off in sheepish embarrassment!
it's hard to believe a more "pure" (i.e., esoteric and exotic regimen discovered by some guru somewhere and involving new equipment for the Y or me to purchase) would be infinitely better.
Free weights, or more "pure", are better because you have to use those small stabilizing muscles that are so important. You know, like the ones in the shoulder that make your arm go exactly where you want instead of just kinda in the general direction.
You CAN hurt yourself on machines. Learn proper form. Machines only prevent you from dropping the weight on your head, they do NOT prevent you from doing a press inappropriately and screwing up your shoulders.
I agree with this 100% and I think swim studies should recruit from masters swimming for research instead of age group and collegiate swimmers. Think of how many Masters swimmers are willing to experiment with training, stroke or nutrition for a season compared to swimmers who are trying to make Jrs/Srs/Trials/NCAAs/etc times.
Agree 99.9% ;)
After worshipping at the church of heavier lifting, I am going to alter my strength and cross training regimen dramatically starting Dec. 15 and see what happens.
No one is denigrating Costill, Jim, we're just saying 6 weeks or some other similarly short time period is insufficient to test, hypothesize and make conclusions about the validity of lifting and drylands.
It's pretty simple, really.
A few years back, I tried to get back into swimming. But I wasn't conditioned. I did some lifting, enough not to be completely untoned, but didn't take it very seriously.
When I got in the pool, it was like hiking through a snowdrift. I had no speed, couldn't establish a pace, and wore out very quickly.
Well, a couple of years ago I decided to get serious about conditioning. I used trainers to help me set up my workouts and started spending an hour a day in the gym.
So 2 months ago when I once again attempted to start a swimming routine, I was amazed at the difference. At that point, I was strong enough so that right off the bat I was skimming thru the water and recovering my old stroke from over 25 years ago, and an hour workout was no problem.
Clearly, the strength training made the difference.
So it's of tremendous benefit for someone in my situation, a returning swimmer.
On the other hand, I recall watching an interview w/ Phelps (60 Minutes, iirc) in which he said he never lifted, so I'm willing to accept that weights make no difference for swimming-conditioned athletes. (I'll see if I can find the cite and link it.)
That said, part of my job involves researching health news, and the points you make in your article about the general health benefits of lifting are right on target. Still, swimming itself is a type of resistance training, so perhaps those benefits can be had thru pool work. I don't know of any studies that compare lifting and swimming. (But I have read recent studies comparing swimming and running over the long term, and swimmers turn out to be healthier and to live longer.)
Very good point. Myself, I was in reasonably decent shape, but no one clued me about the importance of RC work and hence I got immediate tendonitis. :afraid:
On the general health points, this recently came out in the Washington Post:
www.washingtonpost.com/.../AR2009101902901.html
Its truly fascinating to see how my recreation mimics my professional life and how little actual evidence there is for so many tightly held beliefs. I don't have an opinion on this one, yet -- I assumed that weight lifting led to faster swimming because:
a. I was told that it did when I was young
b. It makes sense
c. I take a better poolside picture after a few months of weights
Answers a and b are true for about 80% of clinical medicine, a lot of which is garbage. You don't want to know what we really don't know about treating or preventing disease.
But if you are looking for actual evidence, I offer the following:
www.bmj.com/.../1459
Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials
Gordon C S Smith, professor1, Jill P Pell, consultant2
1 Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 2QQ, 2 Department of Public Health, Greater Glasgow NHS Board, Glasgow G3 8YU
Correspondence to: G C S Smith gcss2@cam.ac.uk
Abstract
Objectives To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge.
Design Systematic review of randomised controlled trials.
Data sources: Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases; appropriate internet sites and citation lists.
Study selection: Studies showing the effects of using a parachute during free fall.
Main outcome measure Death or major trauma, defined as an injury severity score > 15.
Results We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention.
Conclusions As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
Ah, hell.
Hubris is always punished.
Heroic Jim Fonda now sees that his poll numbers have again slipped below 30 percent.
The repitilian brain triumphs! The intellect is a flimsy tissue compared to what the heart wants to believe!
Brute strength once against holds the truth ransom!
