So I got the swimming bug again after the World Championships so I decided yesterday to do a swim meet without having swam at all in 12 years. It was more fun than I expected and I swam about as fast as I was when I stopped swimming (at age 17).
What changed since then? (1) I have no cardio (i.e. died on 35-40m of the 50m LCMs I swam) and (2) 40 extra pounds of muscle with not a lot of extra fat.
I have always been of the view that strength/weight training is vastly underutilized in sports in general and am going to put it to the test in swimming.
My training will consist of only technique training, sprints, kick and very very little yardage (like ~1200 yards a WEEK).
I figure that will be enough to get my cardio to where I can sprint a 50 without dying and I figure all you need for a sprint is to be able to go all out for the whole race, with the remaining factors being power and technique which don't require much yardage I don't think.
Anyone ever try it?
Former Member
Back in the day (early 70s) I was a kinesiology major. We had these hand grip "ergometers" which accurately measured the force you could generate with your grip. The user didn't even have to change into gym clothes. I imagine they are still standard issue for any kinesiology lab or physical therapy office. In contrast, a uniformly calibrated lat pull machine is not going to be available everywhere you might want to make measurements. I suspect there are also many fewer degrees of freedom in the measurement of hand grip strength (basically you just grip it a squeeze it like your life depended on it) than there would be in lat pulls (elbows in/out, hands in/out, hold breath, exhale during the exercise, training effect over time as you learn to involve more muscles or the more correct muscles for the exercise, etc), so the measurement will be more reproducible across labs and over time. It won't obviously be perfect, but it's probably a pretty good proxy for overall upper body strength and the reproducibility will be important when you are trying to compute statistics across a population of subjects.
Skip
Makes sense. Though I question the correlation to overall upper body strength in the general population. Perhaps though on similarly trained athletes it is a good proxy.
Missed this the first time I read your comment.
Phelps recently added Olympic lifts (snatch, clean & jerk). He started lifting immediately following Athens, so about 7 years. I wouldn't say that is recent for someone who is 24.
According to (recent) interviews with Phelps, lifting and dry lands have become a larger focus on his training.
If you so smart, why cain't you beat the weakling that is geriatric me?
Missed this the first time I read your comment.
Phelps recently added Olympic lifts (snatch, clean & jerk). He started lifting immediately following Athens, so about 7 years. I wouldn't say that is recent for someone who is 24.
According to (recent) interviews with Phelps, lifting and dry lands have become a larger focus on his training.
More impressive to me is the improvements Lochte has made after a major overhaul in diet and some very hard core dry land training!
www.floridaswimnetwork.com/.../393
Methinks Jimby should disclose that he has been doing weights, albeit on machines.
Alas, Leslie, its been over a year since my last nautilus session. Perhaps I will attempt again when the weather turns unfriendly for tennis.
