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
I wish I really understood what you are trying to accomplish rather than just asking hypothetical questions.
While you may not like the 'tone' of Jazz Hands' posts, he does know what he is talking about when it comes to weight training, muscle hypertrophy and sprinting.
The problem is Jazz Hands is too busy with put downs and s*** talking to be a constructive addition to this conversation. That's okay though, I plan to keep posting and dealing with the friendlies on here while he can scream as loud as he wants. That's the beauty of a forum, our access is equal. Speaking of which, I find it funny looking through his old posts that he seems to get into it with a lot of people. Anatagonism runs deep with this one, I guess.
Here's what I was asking, perhaps it should be directed to those like Slug who have seen the differences first hand:
If we assume differences are seen (witness, again, his experience), I was looking for even further refinement on what is most efficient. For example, say someone like him noticed that, during weights and swimming, one season he swam only for long distance freestyle and saw one result. The next, he focused on short distance sprinting, say mostly in butterfly, and saw a different set of results. Both while also doing weights.
Such a person could tell me "hey, I see your goals, I got closest to that doing the latter (or the former)". This would save me some experimenting on my own.
That's it.
We've already established that at least some on here have seen a complementary effect of both at once, now I'm just trying to determine if they saw differences within that, based on the type of swimming they did.
I wish I really understood what you are trying to accomplish rather than just asking hypothetical questions.
While you may not like the 'tone' of Jazz Hands' posts, he does know what he is talking about when it comes to weight training, muscle hypertrophy and sprinting.
The problem is Jazz Hands is too busy with put downs and s*** talking to be a constructive addition to this conversation. That's okay though, I plan to keep posting and dealing with the friendlies on here while he can scream as loud as he wants. That's the beauty of a forum, our access is equal. Speaking of which, I find it funny looking through his old posts that he seems to get into it with a lot of people. Anatagonism runs deep with this one, I guess.
Here's what I was asking, perhaps it should be directed to those like Slug who have seen the differences first hand:
If we assume differences are seen (witness, again, his experience), I was looking for even further refinement on what is most efficient. For example, say someone like him noticed that, during weights and swimming, one season he swam only for long distance freestyle and saw one result. The next, he focused on short distance sprinting, say mostly in butterfly, and saw a different set of results. Both while also doing weights.
Such a person could tell me "hey, I see your goals, I got closest to that doing the latter (or the former)". This would save me some experimenting on my own.
That's it.
We've already established that at least some on here have seen a complementary effect of both at once, now I'm just trying to determine if they saw differences within that, based on the type of swimming they did.
