This has been something I've wondered the last few years. I used to be a college swimmer, fit and trim, but the 10 years since then I've drank my fair share of beer and ate plenty of cheeseburgers. Just curious what peoples' take is on how much the extra baggage really effects swim races.
I don't really fit the swimmer mold anymore. I'm 31, 6'2", and 270lbs with a huge beer gut. I got some strange looks since the meet i was in recently was a USAS meet and I outweighed my competition by 100lbs in many cases. My first race in about 5 years i went 23.4 in the 50y free. I didn't expect to be that fast at this weight but at the same time I almost wonder if the added intertia is helping me more on the start and turns. Followed it up with a low 52 in the 100y free but I had a horrible reaction on the start and incorrect pacing. I think if i raced again today that'd be deep in the 51 range. For reference, typical non-taper times for me in college were in the low-mid 22 range at just a tick over 200lbs but I was obviously a lot stronger, younger, and doing a TON more yards at the time, that's why it makes me wonder just how much the weight is actually holding me back.
How much time do you think I stand to drop if i were 50lbs lighter? Could it be a measurable difference or something just slight? I guess I ask that to see if it'd be worth my while to drop that much weight quickly by dieting in addition to the swimming i'm doing. I don't really like dieting, and i generally eat what I want, when i want. Not gorging myself at every meal doesn't really seem to fit into my lifestyle :blush: Anyone have a similar story? "I dropped XX lbs and went XX seconds faster because of it."
Maybe it's an immeasurable, but I thought I'd ask for opinion anyway. I'm hoping it doesn't turn into a "to diet or not to diet" discussion though.
A couple years ago, I went through a somewhat depressing experience that pretty much turned me off my feed for a number of months, I went from my previous fattish weight of 184 down to 164.
I also upped my swimming mileage fairly significantly because it seemed to be one of the best strategies I could come up with to defuse the melancholic heeby jeeby restless agitation of my state.
There are probably all kinds of reasons one could argue why semi-anorexia induced by depression should not be ideal for swimming performance, but I guess hope springs eternal, and I thought that if nothing else, the additional working out and the weight loss would conspire to provide at least one silver lining to the whole wretched time of my life then, i.e., better swimming times.
It didn't make any difference. I swam no faster or, for that matter, slower than before.
It was the same as it always is.
Now, maybe losing 20 lb. when you aren't terribly fat to begin with (though I definitely have the abdominal bulge) isn't enough to make a measurable difference. Or maybe what you gain in terms of weight loss is overwhelmed by other factors, like suboptimal nutrition.
But when I mentioned the fact that losing 10 percent of my body weight had had not appreciable benefit to my swimming, a friend told me he, too, had experimented with swimming at different weights, and that he found it made no difference for him either. He's a USMS All American and very smart guy. But he also was talking weight changes, like mine, of 10-20 lbs., not significantly more.
I guess like everything else, there is probably a lot of individual variation here, but I do think that the kind of weight loss most people have a prayer of sustaining over time is probably not going to make a huge difference in how fast they swim.
A couple years ago, I went through a somewhat depressing experience that pretty much turned me off my feed for a number of months, I went from my previous fattish weight of 184 down to 164.
I also upped my swimming mileage fairly significantly because it seemed to be one of the best strategies I could come up with to defuse the melancholic heeby jeeby restless agitation of my state.
There are probably all kinds of reasons one could argue why semi-anorexia induced by depression should not be ideal for swimming performance, but I guess hope springs eternal, and I thought that if nothing else, the additional working out and the weight loss would conspire to provide at least one silver lining to the whole wretched time of my life then, i.e., better swimming times.
It didn't make any difference. I swam no faster or, for that matter, slower than before.
It was the same as it always is.
Now, maybe losing 20 lb. when you aren't terribly fat to begin with (though I definitely have the abdominal bulge) isn't enough to make a measurable difference. Or maybe what you gain in terms of weight loss is overwhelmed by other factors, like suboptimal nutrition.
But when I mentioned the fact that losing 10 percent of my body weight had had not appreciable benefit to my swimming, a friend told me he, too, had experimented with swimming at different weights, and that he found it made no difference for him either. He's a USMS All American and very smart guy. But he also was talking weight changes, like mine, of 10-20 lbs., not significantly more.
I guess like everything else, there is probably a lot of individual variation here, but I do think that the kind of weight loss most people have a prayer of sustaining over time is probably not going to make a huge difference in how fast they swim.
