Though my form still needs a lot of work, I am considering starting strength training in the near future, since I have read about how it can help swimming speed, form, etc.
However, I am still struggling with the idea of why strength training is needed. Lets assume that lifting a certain weight in a certain way improves a core muscle, which will help steady my posture (?).
Now assuming I don't weight lift, but instead try to hold the proper posture (high elbow, etc.) for a long period of time, and gradually increase the time I do that over weeks and months, won't those muscle(s) automatically improve?
It seems to me that intuitively the proper muscles would gradually get stronger in order to adjust to the frequent usage - that way the exact muscles I need would get stronger, instead of having to train a large array of muscles that have a relation to swimming.
What am I missing?
If I abstained from drylands to await a perfectly well controlled study on the topic that passed the Jazz Hands & Jimby scrutiny, I'd be in a retirement home.
Your comment brings up a great point. If we waited for science to prove training methods we would be 20 years behind the curve. The bottom line is that for every research study that proves something we have another one that contradicts it. So really, at the end of the day science proves very little and it proves it to late. All we can really do is train our athletes or ourselves off of our own experience and base our theories off the research that exists and the education we have.
Grif, with all due respect, this idea that science is too contradictory and too behind the curve to do much good seems to me just a rationale used by anyone who wants to do his own thing and feel 100 percent righteous justification in so doing.
Do not get me wrong--I definitely believe in doing ones own thing. But I also believe that the scientific method is as close as we can come to objectively proving what works best, if not for each individual, then at least for large numbers of individuals.
Clearly, the answers to optimal swim training aren't all in yet, and I suspect that with anything as complex as this, there will be ongoing refinements and new insights for decades to come. But to just relegate those who are trying to make such discoveries as too little, too late fuddy duddies whose findings can be disregarded whenever they contradict any individual guy's personal experience, it seems to me, is the kind of Bush-era anti-science, anti-intellectual "gut reasoning" that sets back progress substantially.
If I abstained from drylands to await a perfectly well controlled study on the topic that passed the Jazz Hands & Jimby scrutiny, I'd be in a retirement home.
Your comment brings up a great point. If we waited for science to prove training methods we would be 20 years behind the curve. The bottom line is that for every research study that proves something we have another one that contradicts it. So really, at the end of the day science proves very little and it proves it to late. All we can really do is train our athletes or ourselves off of our own experience and base our theories off the research that exists and the education we have.
Grif, with all due respect, this idea that science is too contradictory and too behind the curve to do much good seems to me just a rationale used by anyone who wants to do his own thing and feel 100 percent righteous justification in so doing.
Do not get me wrong--I definitely believe in doing ones own thing. But I also believe that the scientific method is as close as we can come to objectively proving what works best, if not for each individual, then at least for large numbers of individuals.
Clearly, the answers to optimal swim training aren't all in yet, and I suspect that with anything as complex as this, there will be ongoing refinements and new insights for decades to come. But to just relegate those who are trying to make such discoveries as too little, too late fuddy duddies whose findings can be disregarded whenever they contradict any individual guy's personal experience, it seems to me, is the kind of Bush-era anti-science, anti-intellectual "gut reasoning" that sets back progress substantially.
