A sprint experiment

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 :) Perhaps and then I can adjust it .. though with 4 available 50s that is probably enough to keep me satisfied. Plus, its's not like I'm going to get to the level where I 'need' to be able to swim a 100 in order to swim strokes other than freestyle. And if it happens then I'll just up the swimming.

It can if you do it right, but I think you don't need to be as cautious as you are right now about avoiding some threshold of pool work that might ruin your strength. Especially if you just focus on yardage. The benefits as well as the stress from swim training both depend on intensity. So don't be afraid to spend some extra time and distance on technique, which is the most important part of the sport by far. Agree with Jazz. My low yardage swimming does not effect my lifting progress. Really, the reverse is true, or at least I have to battle through feeling sore in the pool. I took 24 years off before I became a masters swimmer at 44. I had no problem doing slow swimming and technique work, and I needed it. Do 25s for that. After 4 months of swimming, I popped off some pretty fast 50s at my first meet.

Mr. Gaash, Since you appear to be relatively new to the forums, you may not have seen some of our former debates on just how much benefit weight lifting provides to swimmers. On one side of the debate, you have Leslie 'The Fortress' Livingston, JazzHands, and pretty much anybody who enjoys weight lifting. On the other side of the debate, you have me and Science. I have yet to see any peer-reviewed journal article that shows convincingly (or even suggests possibly) that weight lifting helps swimming performance. There is endless anecdotal evidence in support of this element of intuitive "Old Wives Tale" conjecture; there is, alas, precious little if any replicated study suggesting it is true. Mickey made the point that there is lots of overtraining in swimming. In the elite ranks, this is probably true...to a degree. But look at Phelps. When he got his 8 gold medals, he was swimming prodigious amounts of yardage, 6--and often 7--days a week, sometimes doing doubles. There are some masters who do prodigious amounts of yards now, relatively speaking. The following folks have all swum at least 750 miles so far this year (Don has topped 1,000 miles): 05/25 Don Tatzin M59 OAK 07/01 Carl D Olson M58 ADMS 07/26 Jean M Carlson F49 SBM 08/03 Shirley A Loftus-Charley F60 VMST 08/09 Darcy H LaFountain F56 FLAQ 08/10 Harriet M Wall F69 MICHThe only one of the above I have met in person is Shirley, and she is an awesome open water swimmer. I do not think you will see too many all out sprinters atop the Go the Distance stat list. My point is that overtraining is a phenomenon you see in college and elite athletes, but very rarely in masters. At the risk of being incendiary, we had an older fellow on our team not too long ago who was very impressed with Popov's method of training, which the teammate claimed consisted almost entirely of slow motion swimming that focused on perfect technique. So this is what he would do--every practice, the entire time, swimming like some kind of manatee trying out for the lead in Swan Lake! I concluded the guy was just lazy as hell. He didn't want to work hard in the pool, not that he was in any way obligated to do so. But he wanted to preserve the illusion that he was swimming "the smart way" to optimize his performance. Again, it is absolutely your right to swim as little as possible while training to become a faster swimmer! I don't know why this notion brings out a touch of feistiness in me, but for some reason it does! I have met JazzHands. I have seenJazzHands smoke in the water. Even more impressive, I have met JazzHands' smoking hot girlfriend. Ditto for Leslie. She is an absolutely amazing swimmer who spends an awful lot of time out of the water doing various dry land exercises. However, she also practices something most of us don't practice nearly enough: SDK. She has become incredibly good at this, in part because of her monofin shooters. I don't know if it is possible to simulate this with weights; I suspect her core exercises do help prevent back spasms and the like which tend to afflict me whenever I do too much of any sort of kicking practice. I am rambling. I am no longer even sure what point I am trying to make here. Oh, now I remember! Ask yourself, in your heart of hearts, if you are avoiding pool time because you don't like it/don't feel you are good at it/find it too much hard work for your taste at this particular juncture of life. If the answer to any of these is yes, reconsider the advisability of not swimming much to get better at swimming. And take corrective action!

My impression is that most swim workouts involve overtraining and better results could be gotten with more focus. When I read that shoulder pain is more prevalent in high school level swimmers than in older swimmers, I think "destructive overtaining" Maybe coaches use overtraining to filter for the most highly motivated? Overtraining as hazing? A while ago, a coach posted on here about letting one swimmer (who later became an olympian) train less than the team. I've been thinking - it would be a rare coach, indeed, that would do that for a kid whose highest potential, say, would be to get a partial scholarship for a non-powerhouse college team. I read about something similar in principle for marathon runners "Run Fater, Run Less." Amazon.com: Runner's World Run Less, Run Faster: Become a Faster, Stronger Runner with the Revolutionary FIRST Training Program (9781594866494): Bill Pierce, Scott Murr, Ray Moss: Books As near as I can see, the "run faster" is only slightly faster. The book could be more accurately: "Run less, Run without injury, Enjoy it, Still Run Fast." I used a modication of this program to train for Upper Michigan's Teal Lake 2.25 mile Swim for Diabetes for this year. Bettered my old time by 16 minutes. (Now I'm just slow. But continents now longer drift past me when I swim.) I'm guessing that your program's success might depend on some fine tuning in the exact lifting exercises you do. It will be interesting to see how this experiment plays out. Good luck. Thanks. This is exactly what I am getting at but you phrased it much more elequoently than I could. Overtraining is very real and very underrated/ignored.

Agree about technique, just not sure that I will be able to swim w/good technique and distance right now LOL... whereas I can swim with good technique for short distances. The point isn't distance, it's repetition. Drills are best done as 25s, I think. Choose something to focus on and keep repeating until it feels right.

The point isn't distance, it's repetition. Drills are best done as 25s, I think. Choose something to focus on and keep repeating until it feels right. Agree and I plan on doing this. My comment was in response to long warm-up/slow swims which is what I "can't" do right now without sacrificing technique or interfering w/lifting. Obviously I can swim 200 yards if its a set of 25s lol...

I compete against a couple "strength" swimmers who are fast because they are strong and one got faster as their technique improved. Neither one of the pool trains serious but it is quite obvious that both of them spend a lot of time at the gym. Based on this HUGE dataset, I think your experiment will be successful. This is a swimming forum, and you will find some swimming purists here. If you find yourself defending you approach 5 times in 2 days with 1 person, you might have found one of the purist who don't believe weight training has any place in the sport of swimming. Your concern about aerobic exercise catabalizing your mass seems legit to me. A lean 175 is more difficult to maintain at 5'8" than it is at 6'2". When you do real "ATG" do you eat rice? t0.gstatic.com/images

Mr. Gaash, Since you appear to be relatively new to the forums, you may not have seen some of our former debates on just how much benefit weight lifting provides to swimmers. On one side of the debate, you have Leslie 'The Fortress' Livingston, JazzHands, and pretty much anybody who enjoys weight lifting. On the other side of the debate, you have me and Science. I have yet to see any peer-reviewed journal article that shows convincingly (or even suggests possibly) that weight lifting helps swimming performance. There is endless anecdotal evidence in support of this element of intuitive "Old Wives Tale" conjecture; there is, alas, precious little if any replicated study suggesting it is true. Mickey made the point that there is lots of overtraining in swimming. In the elite ranks, this is probably true...to a degree. But look at Phelps. When he got his 8 gold medals, he was swimming prodigious amounts of yardage, 6--and often 7--days a week, sometimes doing doubles. There are some masters who do prodigious amounts of yards now, relatively speaking. The following folks have all swum at least 750 miles so far this year (Don has topped 1,000 miles): 05/25 Don Tatzin M59 OAK 07/01 Carl D Olson M58 ADMS 07/26 Jean M Carlson F49 SBM 08/03 Shirley A Loftus-Charley F60 VMST 08/09 Darcy H LaFountain F56 FLAQ 08/10 Harriet M Wall F69 MICHThe only one of the above I have met in person is Shirley, and she is an awesome open water swimmer. I do not think you will see too many all out sprinters atop the Go the Distance stat list. My point is that overtraining is a phenomenon you see in college and elite athletes, but very rarely in masters. At the risk of being incendiary, we had an older fellow on our team not too long ago who was very impressed with Popov's method of training, which the teammate claimed consisted almost entirely of slow motion swimming that focused on perfect technique. So this is what he would do--every practice, the entire time, swimming like some kind of manatee trying out for the lead in Swan Lake! I concluded the guy was just lazy as hell. He didn't want to work hard in the pool, not that he was in any way obligated to do so. But he wanted to preserve the illusion that he was swimming "the smart way" to optimize his performance. Again, it is absolutely your right to swim as little as possible while training to become a faster swimmer! I don't know why this notion brings out a touch of feistiness in me, but for some reason it does! I have met JazzHands. I have seenJazzHands smoke in the water. Even more impressive, I have met JazzHands' smoking hot girlfriend. Ditto for Leslie. She is an absolutely amazing swimmer who spends an awful lot of time out of the water doing various dry land exercises. However, she also practices something most of us don't practice nearly enough: SDK. She has become incredibly good at this, in part because of her monofin shooters. I don't know if it is possible to simulate this with weights; I suspect her core exercises do help prevent back spasms and the like which tend to afflict me whenever I do too much of any sort of kicking practice. I am rambling. I am no longer even sure what point I am trying to make here. Oh, now I remember! Ask yourself, in your heart of hearts, if you are avoiding pool time because you don't like it/don't feel you are good at it/find it too much hard work for your taste at this particular juncture of life. If the answer to any of these is yes, reconsider the advisability of not swimming much to get better at swimming. And take corrective action! Jim, didn't I show you this one? www.teamunify.com/.../EFFECTS OF DRY-LAND VS. RESISTED- AND.pdf

I compete against a couple "strength" swimmers who are fast because they are strong and one got faster as their technique improved. Neither one of the pool trains serious but it is quite obvious that both of them spend a lot of time at the gym. Based on this HUGE dataset, I think your experiment will be successful. This is a swimming forum, and you will find some swimming purists here. If you find yourself defending you approach 5 times in 2 days with 1 person, you might have found one of the purist who don't believe weight training has any place in the sport of swimming. Your concern about aerobic exercise catabalizing your mass seems legit to me. A lean 175 is more difficult to maintain at 5'8" than it is at 6'2". When you do real "ATG" do you eat rice? t0.gstatic.com/images Lol to the rice... nope alas I don't. Yep I noticed Jim is more a purist than most and there is a chance he is right but I hope to find out one way or another soon enough! Jim: Anecdotal evidence is quite strong, strong enough that I highly doubt the lack of peer reviewed literature really makes a difference. I could tell you 1+1=2 and whether or not it was peer reviewed it would still be valid. This is not to say that my extreme approach is valid, but to suggest that (a) weightlifting does not benefit swimming (in particular, sprinters) (b) that "too much" swimming (or any activity frankly) does interferes with ability of the body to buid muscle are both hardly justified by both anecdotal evidence or any science, for that matter. Plus, I should mention, I used to (and still do occasionally) do brazilian jiu jitsu ... even doing that 2-3x a week (about 1-1.5hrs each day) pretty much assured of at best muscle maintenance so I have some experience mixing lifting with other physically intensive activities to know how my body reacts to certain amounts of cardio (and muscle) intensive activities in conjunction with lifting. I also know that I am not some obscure unique case, as much as we all like to think we are special :)

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. I disagree with that, just because yardage is a poor indicator of training stress. You should be able to fill a swim workout with 2,000 yards of slow recovery and technique work, and do that six days a week (for 12,000 total) with little to no negative impact on strength. Slow swimming is like walking; I don't even count it. Some of the technique work should be up-tempo, but it's not a problem if you control the volume and the intensity.