Hello... I am a very serious runner and I am considering using swimming as cross training. I am a distance runner and I would like to know what kind of workouts to do that would help my endurance and my lung capacity. I'll be swimming 2 times a week on top of running twice a day every day in case you need to know. Thanks for the help.
Nick
Swimming is great exercise, but it probably won't help your running much at all. Training is extremely specific; they've done trials where they had volunteers train one leg on a stationary bike and not the other. When they subsequently tested the volunteers' VO2 Max, they showed great cardiovascular endurance when using the trained leg; mediocre results with the untrained leg. There was virtually no crossover effect.
Ditto from swimming to running, or vice versa. Your heart will benefit perhaps just from doing more aerobic work, but your performance in running will not improve. (There's even debate as to whether wt lifting helps swimming, but that's another story.)
As far as increasing lung capacity, this too is something of a myth. What training does is not increase the size or the ability of lungs to take in more oxygen; it increases the ability of trained muscles to extract and use more oxygen from the blood. (There have been Olympians who performed well with only one lung, which shows that oxygen intake per se is not the limiting factor--it's the body's ability to use the oxygen.) Once again, getting your swimming muscles in shape will allow them to extract and process more oxygen, which will allow you to swim faster longer. But this won't help your running because you are using entirely different muscles for running. Even the kick you use when swimming taps into different muscles than running. (Biking may have more cross over effect, but it's still not as good at improving running as running itself.)
By all means, swim to break up the monotony; swim because it's a great sport in its own right; but don't count on swimming to make you faster on land or give you more endurance out of the water.
Swimming is great exercise, but it probably won't help your running much at all. Training is extremely specific; they've done trials where they had volunteers train one leg on a stationary bike and not the other. When they subsequently tested the volunteers' VO2 Max, they showed great cardiovascular endurance when using the trained leg; mediocre results with the untrained leg. There was virtually no crossover effect.
Ditto from swimming to running, or vice versa. Your heart will benefit perhaps just from doing more aerobic work, but your performance in running will not improve. (There's even debate as to whether wt lifting helps swimming, but that's another story.)
As far as increasing lung capacity, this too is something of a myth. What training does is not increase the size or the ability of lungs to take in more oxygen; it increases the ability of trained muscles to extract and use more oxygen from the blood. (There have been Olympians who performed well with only one lung, which shows that oxygen intake per se is not the limiting factor--it's the body's ability to use the oxygen.) Once again, getting your swimming muscles in shape will allow them to extract and process more oxygen, which will allow you to swim faster longer. But this won't help your running because you are using entirely different muscles for running. Even the kick you use when swimming taps into different muscles than running. (Biking may have more cross over effect, but it's still not as good at improving running as running itself.)
By all means, swim to break up the monotony; swim because it's a great sport in its own right; but don't count on swimming to make you faster on land or give you more endurance out of the water.
