Does swimming "inform" muscle growth? A dryland/weights q.
Former Member
Ok, so here's the thing. I know well and good by now that swimming does not really build substantial muscle mass. If there was any doubt, all you'd have to do is look at someone like Mark Spitz- an Olympic champion who clearly would have swam enough to see any of the benefits swimming had to offer:
www.tierraunica.com/.../6a00e551962103883300e55419aa128834-800wi
Compare that though to today's champions:
4.bp.blogspot.com/.../ryanlochte.jpgwww.popstarsplus.com/.../MichaelPhelpsPicture.jpg
Obviously huge by comparison. Now, the simple answer might be "weights. These guys do a lot more dryland than they did back in the day". But here's the thing- in all my years of lifting, I have never once seen anyone lifting beside me at the gym built like these guys. The people I see are jacked, sure, but proportioned very differently- and I've seen hundreds if not thousands of guys who were serious about weights!
The only time I *did* see, in person, people who looked like the pics above were, no big surprise, the guys on the local college's swim team.
So I contacted the coach and she was kind enough to send me their dryland routine- and guess what? Incline bench, deadlifts, flys, laterals, etc. etc. etc. In other words, the same identical program that countless weightlifters use every day. There was no magic formula to it.
So this left me really confused. Swimming alone doesn't build this sort of physique. But weights alone don't do it either.
Is their some sort of magic I'm missing here? Does something happen with the combination of the two that results in this type of build?
Please chime in if you have a lot of dryland experience or, even more so, if you're actually built like this from doing these things!
Thanks so much for your help,
BB
Parents
Former Member
Slug- a lucid, relevant, and, most important of all, applicable example!!! Thank you- this is exactly the sort of A vs. B experience I was looking for.
Is chasing a physique silly? Sure, why not. But then gyms across the globe are packed with the silly :). At least in this way (and with knowledge like yours) I can do it in the most efficient manner and get to the point where I'm maintaining what I've earned, as opposed to chasing.
If it matters, this is me and my genetic predisposition:
i1014.photobucket.com/.../temp.jpg
As you can tell, it's at least within reaching distance of what I'm going for. Had I been starting from someplace wildly different, I'd agree it'd be a fool's errand.
To answer your question, I don't know what the right ratio is, so right now I'm going for a simple alternation. Three days a week- weights, swim, weights, swim, etc. For the swim portion I'm shooting for all out sprinting to increase distance. On any given day, I'll take two of the strokes and, after warmup, just go for an all out killer to see how far I can go on max burners with each stroke. And then the next time I do those two, I'll seek to increase each by a half or full length. Basically just applying the killer-set approach from weightlifting (which has worked for me) to swimming.
That's about it.
(and you see Jazz Hands, this was all I needed, nothing more! :) )
Slug- a lucid, relevant, and, most important of all, applicable example!!! Thank you- this is exactly the sort of A vs. B experience I was looking for.
Is chasing a physique silly? Sure, why not. But then gyms across the globe are packed with the silly :). At least in this way (and with knowledge like yours) I can do it in the most efficient manner and get to the point where I'm maintaining what I've earned, as opposed to chasing.
If it matters, this is me and my genetic predisposition:
i1014.photobucket.com/.../temp.jpg
As you can tell, it's at least within reaching distance of what I'm going for. Had I been starting from someplace wildly different, I'd agree it'd be a fool's errand.
To answer your question, I don't know what the right ratio is, so right now I'm going for a simple alternation. Three days a week- weights, swim, weights, swim, etc. For the swim portion I'm shooting for all out sprinting to increase distance. On any given day, I'll take two of the strokes and, after warmup, just go for an all out killer to see how far I can go on max burners with each stroke. And then the next time I do those two, I'll seek to increase each by a half or full length. Basically just applying the killer-set approach from weightlifting (which has worked for me) to swimming.
That's about it.
(and you see Jazz Hands, this was all I needed, nothing more! :) )
