A sprint experiment

What's your reasoning? Are you saying if you're tired from swimming you can't work as hard in the weight room or that swimming itself interferes with these things? Well (1) is from personal experience with lifting and swimming. (lifting while swimming 12hrs/week = 5lbs muscle gained in 2yrs, quit swimming = 20lbs muscle gained in 3 MONTHS) There is also tons more anecdotal evidence and I'm sure some research on the matter. It's overtraining essentially. After lifting heavy (the most optimal way to lift for strength and explosive power) the body needs rest for both the central nervous system and muscles to rebuild. It is why many serious lifters only lift a body part 1x a week but since swimming is full body you are going to be working out muscles "too much" if you swim a lot and lift. There is also some suggestions that cardio is catabolic as it is easier for your body to burn muscle for fast energy needs than fat particularly once it exhausts readily available sugars/etc. in the body. I may not be explaining all the physiological stuff well but the bottom line is that swimming and weight lifting (particularly heavy weights) is too much on most non steroid enhanced bodies. (It is the reason you see a lot of steroid use in sports even by guys who don't look like arnold schwarzenegger (so they can maintain/add modest amounts of muscle while training hours of cardio intensive activities a day) As for the benefits of heavy weight/low reps they are plentiful but mostly stem from improvements due to muscle fiber recruitment (i.e. you rarely work the very large fast twitch muscles unless you are doing explosive movements)

I should also point out I am about 5'8". While my wingspan is > 6ft the reality is I have a very poor build for swimming which is another reason I am interesting in an unconventional approach. Where I think I can develop an edge over other swimmers is strength and explosiveness especially per body weight.

Anyone ever try it? Yeah. Half of my training is focused on muscle building, and I've had good meets where I trained something more like 300 yards/meters a week. So you're well over what's necessary for a decent 50.

Cool. Yeah I found your blog and have been reading it. My kick needs some work and I figure I can improve technique some which is why I think I will need some more yardage but I definitely don't want to be > 2000 yards/week and that's assuming a lot of it is slow technique type work otherwise there is little chance I maintain what muscle I have let alone gain. Does the place where you life and do drylands not have a pool? If you swim 3 times a week, 700 yards per practice, I can't imagine this will rack up too much of your time. (It would be different if you had to make a separate trip just to swim.) Say you did an incredibly slow tai chai style warm up of 200 yards. This would take what? Five minutes at the absolute most? Then you do 400 yards broken into whatever you consider to be swim training--most likely short sprints either swimming or kicking on a generous rest interval. Say you do these as 16 x 25 on 2 minutes. Add in another 32 minutes. That leaves you with 100 cool down. Take another five minuts! So at the absolute most, you are swimming (and resting!) 700 yards in less than three-quarters of an hour, three times a week. If you really can't spare the time away from the barbells, I say: end with the swim. Then you can skip the shower and get back home or work without further delay!

Just curious, what is your lifetime personal best? If it's fast then yes. If it's slow (like me), then consider spending lot's of time and yards in the pool learning how to swim correctly. The most powerful person on the planet probably can't even swim

Yeah. Half of my training is focused on muscle building, and I've had good meets where I trained something more like 300 yards/meters a week. So you're well over what's necessary for a decent 50. Cool. Yeah I found your blog and have been reading it. My kick needs some work and I figure I can improve technique some which is why I think I will need some more yardage but I definitely don't want to be > 2000 yards/week and that's assuming a lot of it is slow technique type work otherwise there is little chance I maintain what muscle I have let alone gain.

The idea w/minimizing the swimming to the bare minimum is that too much swimming interferes with ability to gain strength/power/explosiveness. What's your reasoning? Are you saying if you're tired from swimming you can't work as hard in the weight room or that swimming itself interferes with these things?

Does the place where you life and do drylands not have a pool? If you swim 3 times a week, 700 yards per practice, I can't imagine this will rack up too much of your time. (It would be different if you had to make a separate trip just to swim.) Say you did an incredibly slow tai chai style warm up of 200 yards. This would take what? Five minutes at the absolute most? Then you do 400 yards broken into whatever you consider to be swim training--most likely short sprints either swimming or kicking on a generous rest interval. Say you do these as 16 x 25 on 2 minutes. Add in another 32 minutes. That leaves you with 100 cool down. Take another five minuts! So at the absolute most, you are swimming (and resting!) 700 yards in less than three-quarters of an hour, three times a week. If you really can't spare the time away from the barbells, I say: end with the swim. Then you can skip the shower and get back home or work without further delay! The pool in my gym is 18 yards which is annoying but still useable nevertheless. It's not an issue of time, it's an issue of swimming as MUCH (yes as much) as possible WITHOUT compromising results from weight training. If I see I can swim more than 2000yards/week and still make gains in the weightroom I will swim more, but I suspect from experience that it is unlikely I could do more than that and make any progress in the gym at the same tmie.

The more I think about it I probably need around 1800-2000 yards/week. I hope that I will build endurance for both short and long course 50s.. the meet I did yesterday were long course 50s and I died with about 10-15m left. This is after not swimming in a pool for about 12 years so I think even on low yardage I will build up the sprint endurance I need for a 50 of either form. 50 yards/meters is an awfully short event. I bet that once you start doing more meets you are going to want more for the time/money/travel invested, which will lead to doing stroke 50s, 100s, etc. All of which require more time in the pool, which I'm sure you will enjoy anyway. Not that it matters one way or the other. I'm just hypothesizing. Personally no matter how many events I sign up for at a meet I always leave wishing I had swum more.. with the exception of the one time that I did 6 events including the 200 free and the 200 breaststroke. That was enough :)

I swam about as fast as I was when I stopped swimming (at age 17). What changed since then? Maybe you just weren't that fast back then, and you are now :angel: Maybe your starts and turns are better, because your pushoffs are way more powerful? Anyone ever try it? I've been doing a similar thing for 1.5 years, only a slightly different approach. For me, weights are complimental to swimming rather than supplemental as you describe. I'm going more than 1200 or 2000 per week. (but not too much more at 6000/wk, 3000 of that is warmup). I'm within a half second of all my PB 50's from college, and 60lbs heavier. There's definitely a lot you can do for speed without doing a boat load of yards... just make your yards count for quality, and do the things that will make you faster for 50's.