Does cycling help swimming?

Does the way the muscles are used in cycling help with swimming? I feel it does. When pedaling the bike it makes me think of kicking in freestyle, especially 2 beat kicks (of course I don't mean I kick the way I pedal a bike). Do you have any body weight you'd like to get rid of? If so, cycling will indirectly help your swimming performances. @Allen Stark, brilliant. Not sure if it's true, but at least the muscles masses involved are kind of close, and the angles are somehow related. I'd say though that if there's any cross transfer between the gesture of riding and breaststroke kicking, it's probably amplified if riding uphill at relatively low cadence. I don't expect to do any IM this year. But if I am to ever get back to breaststroke kicking (which I can't do at the moment), gym squats with wide anchor points would be my injury prevention strategy. And all cycling done over the last 10 years have reconstructed my knees, to an extent that goes beyong my wildest dream back then. Never though I'd be able to squat in the gym for instance. Breaststroke kicking is probably next. ----- You can ride your bike under the sun for 3-4 or more hours at the time, for up to 300kilo per week. If you had some body weight you need to drop, summer time riding and having fun looking at landscape and enjoying chats with friends will do the job much better than working out in coldish water for 90 minutes at the time 3x per week. I'd even go as far as if you're a cycling lover, and have some 20pounds or so to loose, drop a swim workout or two in favor of more cycling during summer (off swimming season). It's worth it. You'll thus sacrifice quite a bit of swimming performances for the time being, but that's periodization. There's a time for everything. When you get back in the pool in Autumn, lighter by 20pounds, fly won't feel the same. As far as physiology, any work that results into an increase in either mitonchondria size or number, increase in plasma volume as a result of dehydration rehydration cycles and work over threshold (climbing hills) etc etc, will indirectly be felt somehow. More blood better cardiac output, better cardiac output more resistance at higher intensity no matter the sport. Of course, further work needs to be done to train the muscle more specifically for swimming, but this network that provides blood to working muscle is reused. Oh hey. I was almost going to forget. I am very lousy in the pool these days. Train for 2k per week roughly. Slow like hell. But bring me a kicking set any time, and I lead the squad. My kicking performances just don't drop as much as my pulling performances for instance, in absence of serious swimming. My cardio vascular fitness is outstanding though. I log 4 hours of very hard sustained threshold stuff per week. I can kick without really getting tired. It burns a bit but I don't care. I'm used to it. And it's just normal. The ability to metabolize and shuffle the lactate is not that specific to sport. It's just shuffling lactate from blood back to cell or out to liver that sort of stuff. So sorry for the long post, but at last I propose a different voice. Yes cycling can help ******kicking******* especially if your leg endurance is currently low. The thing is that we don't spend that much time in the pool kicking, lots of masters hate that. So we're comparing 20min of kicking (at best) with 2 hours of riding. Impact on aerobic network development is significantly higher when cycling. Allen, thanks for the clue. It makes perfect sense to me.

Does the way the muscles are used in cycling help with swimming? I feel it does. When pedaling the bike it makes me think of kicking in freestyle, especially 2 beat kicks (of course I don't mean I kick the way I pedal a bike). Do you have any body weight you'd like to get rid of? If so, cycling will indirectly help your swimming performances. @Allen Stark, brilliant. Not sure if it's true, but at least the muscles masses involved are kind of close, and the angles are somehow related. I'd say though that if there's any cross transfer between the gesture of riding and breaststroke kicking, it's probably amplified if riding uphill at relatively low cadence. I don't expect to do any IM this year. But if I am to ever get back to breaststroke kicking (which I can't do at the moment), gym squats with wide anchor points would be my injury prevention strategy. And all cycling done over the last 10 years have reconstructed my knees, to an extent that goes beyong my wildest dream back then. Never though I'd be able to squat in the gym for instance. Breaststroke kicking is probably next. ----- You can ride your bike under the sun for 3-4 or more hours at the time, for up to 300kilo per week. If you had some body weight you need to drop, summer time riding and having fun looking at landscape and enjoying chats with friends will do the job much better than working out in coldish water for 90 minutes at the time 3x per week. I'd even go as far as if you're a cycling lover, and have some 20pounds or so to loose, drop a swim workout or two in favor of more cycling during summer (off swimming season). It's worth it. You'll thus sacrifice quite a bit of swimming performances for the time being, but that's periodization. There's a time for everything. When you get back in the pool in Autumn, lighter by 20pounds, fly won't feel the same. As far as physiology, any work that results into an increase in either mitonchondria size or number, increase in plasma volume as a result of dehydration rehydration cycles and work over threshold (climbing hills) etc etc, will indirectly be felt somehow. More blood better cardiac output, better cardiac output more resistance at higher intensity no matter the sport. Of course, further work needs to be done to train the muscle more specifically for swimming, but this network that provides blood to working muscle is reused. Oh hey. I was almost going to forget. I am very lousy in the pool these days. Train for 2k per week roughly. Slow like hell. But bring me a kicking set any time, and I lead the squad. My kicking performances just don't drop as much as my pulling performances for instance, in absence of serious swimming. My cardio vascular fitness is outstanding though. I log 4 hours of very hard sustained threshold stuff per week. I can kick without really getting tired. It burns a bit but I don't care. I'm used to it. And it's just normal. The ability to metabolize and shuffle the lactate is not that specific to sport. It's just shuffling lactate from blood back to cell or out to liver that sort of stuff. So sorry for the long post, but at last I propose a different voice. Yes cycling can help ******kicking******* especially if your leg endurance is currently low. The thing is that we don't spend that much time in the pool kicking, lots of masters hate that. So we're comparing 20min of kicking (at best) with 2 hours of riding. Impact on aerobic network development is significantly higher when cycling. Allen, thanks for the clue. It makes perfect sense to me.