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Fish Donât Have Biceps So Why Should I Weight Train for Swimming?
Weight Training
Mannheim Trainer Focuses on Total Body
Sullivan Fitness Center Coordinator and Fitness Facility Manager, Jessie Dayton assists fitness center patrons during their work-out Oct. 25 in Mannheim. Dayton has made it his mission to help community members improve their overall fitness. The former Soldier also incorporates breathing and relaxation techniques into his training to help students reduce stress. (Photo by Dijon Rolle, USAG Baden-Wuerttemberg Public Affairs)
Fish Donât Have Biceps So Why Should I Weight Train for Swimming?
Article by Alex Miller
First off, weight training for swimming is not just another trendy thing. Your competitive swimming rivals are using sports specific training. If they are doing it and it’s working for them and you are not doing it, then they will probably beat you. The water is both a resistance and liquid medium that you glide through. In swimming you are using pulling, pushing and kicking motions to propel yourself forward. Resistance exercises that mimic these movements will improve the speed and power of your strokes. That should be enough to get you started with some sort of dry land anaerobic exercise regimen.
Will Weight Training Make Me a Better Swimmer?
It is important to define what you mean by better. If by better you mean will it make you faster in swimming when the split seconds count then yes; with a sports specific training program, the way your muscles and nervous system generally cope with fatigue during a race will improve significantly.
What is the Best Way to Develop Anaerobic Power for Swimming?
First of all, the term anaerobic means “without oxygen.” Your muscles use up oxygen to do work. When they run out of oxygen, they can’t move. An anaerobic workout using weights will, in time, make your muscles more efficient by creating a greater capacity and efficiency for them to use the oxygen that you breathe in. One of the best ways to develop anaerobic efficiency is by sticking to a weight training program.
Is it Okay to Do Weight Training and Swimming Every Day?
There may be some debate about this. The best answer is that it depends on what your goals are and what your present fitness level is like. If your goal is to create your ideal physique for bodybuilding, then that is outside the scope of this article. As a bodybuilder, you will be using swimming as an aerobic exercise just to burn fat. Your goals then would be different.
As a competitive swimmer, no, it would not be advisable to weigh train every day. Adequate recovery is needed for your swimming. In fact, the best routine to follow would be some type of circuit training no more than two or three days a week. CR training is when you choose six to twelve exercises doing one after the other. Lighter weights than usual are used and you rest no more than thirty seconds in between exercise sets. If you were training off season you might follow a two month cycle in which you would start off with lighter weights performing fifteen to twenty reps which activate the slow twitch muscle fibers. During the two months you add more and more weight to your exercises until you are doing between eight to twelve reps (or even less) per exercise. Mix it up a bit. Do no more than three rounds of a circuit.
Some exercises may include:
Incline bench press for chest
Back squats for hip and knee extensio
Leg press
Leg extensions
Leg curls
Calf work
All kinds of rowing
Pull ups
Standing tricep press downs
Bicep curls
Stomach crunches
Hyperextensions
Can You Give Me an Exercise for the Front Crawl Stroke?
A good exercise for the crawl stroke is to find an overhead pulley system in your gym. Grab a hold of the pulley handle with one hand and get down on your knees. With your arm straight, pull down in front of you palm down using your lats, triceps and stomach muscles simulating crawl mechanics. Repeat.
Some More Ideas
1) Flutter kicks with ankle weights. Lie on your back on the floor or on a weight bench with half of your legs hanging off. Do as many flutter kicks as you can without going to failure. These will target your thighs and lower abdomen. Do the same lying on your stomach to strengthen your hamstrings, glutes and lower back.
2) To strengthen shoulder, trapezius and upper back muscles for crawl and butterfly strokes, lie on your stomach on a (weight) bench. With your arms hanging down, hold a light dumbbell in each hand palms facing each other. Using the butterfly stroke motion, slowly pull the dumbbells back then out and up and around towards the front and then down as you mimic the motion of your hands re-entering the water in the stroke. At the top of the motion, your palms should be facing down. Repeat. Use one dumbbell at a time to develop crawling motion.
3) This movement is somewhat the opposite of the previous one to develop the crawl and butterfly strokes. You lie on your back and execute a type of pullover. Lie supine and start out with arms straight overhead towards ceiling holding dumbbells with palms facing away from you. In a circular motion, move both dumbbells away, down and back around and then “pull” the weights back up to the starting position. During the circular motion, keep arms semi-straight and palms in the direction as they would be when doing the butterfly stroke. Repeat. Then use one dumbbell at a time to develop the muscles used for the crawl stroke.
You Get the Drift
Your dry land weight training for swimming is supposed to simulate swim strokes. Training with cable pulleys and using various medicine ball throws are also excellent. Swimmers and triathletes would both benefit from sports specific weight training. Adding weight training to your swimming workouts is surely adding more work to your schedule but you’ll end up being stronger and faster in the water.
Men’s Health: The Book of Muscle : The World’s Most Authoritative Guide to Building Your Body
Weight Training – click on the image below for more information.
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Weight Training
The World’s Most AUTHORITATIVE Guide to Building Your Body
You probably know a lot about building muscle. You know which curl is the best for your biceps, you do every possible exercise for your abdominals, and your 20-set bench-press routine is the envy of everyone in the gym. So why haven’t you gotten the results you want?
This book has the answer. In fact, it probably answers every question you’ve ever asked about how your muscles work: What makes them grow? What makes them sh
Men’s Health: The Book of Muscle : The World’s Most Authoritative Guide to Building Your Body
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Exposing two common weight-loss lies
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The optimum way to increase lean muscle is to focus on strength training and ingesting a diet of quality foods with the nutrients that will afford you the ability to repair and increase muscle while also restoring muscle glycogen. …
Weight Training question by PJG: What are the benefits of weight training?
I want to get in shape to try and boost my confidence levels. I’ve just start cardio. Swimming 4 times a week for an hour and light running at the moment for about 15-20 minutes once a week.
What are the benefits of weight training if I take it up?
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Answer by Daniel L
Larger muscle mass, greater strength, you burn more calories because of greater muscle mass (burn more fat during rest, you can also eat more), stronger musculo-skeletal system, stronger tendons
Filed under: Weight Training · Tags: Biceps, Donât, Fish, Should, Swimming, Train, Weight
Excellent first book,
In many respects this is the perfect first book for someone looking to get into regular exercise. More than most other books in the genre, this one seems to have more than a modicum of scientific understanding backing it. The first sections set the tone, going over the actual science of muscles, why they get bigger, and how. The authors know their audience, though, and don’t overdo the science. However, if you are going to lift weights then you need some level of understanding of what things work and why. This first section gives you that. I personally would have liked to see more scientific detail and references but understand that that probably would alienate large chunks of their target audience.
After that primer you get introduced to the major muscles and the exercises that target them. There are also sections on diet, warming up, and stretching. While none of these sections are comprehensive, and many have been done better elsewhere, they are done well enough here that it makes the book a viable one stop shop for beginners.
Before you rush out and buy this, though, there are few caveats.
One, the book does not cater to the home exerciser. Depending on how well stocked your home gym is and how creative you are with coming up with replacement exercises this might not be a big deal, but the exercises DO assume access to barbells, dumbbells, and a machine.
Two, some of the exercise descriptions are lacking detail or, in a few cases, plain wrong. The upright row, for instance, shows a form — bringing your elbows way above parallel — that most trainers and researchers caution against because it causes shoulder injury in many people. I would expect the world’s most authoritative guide to at least mention this.
Three, the routines provided sometimes leave me scratching my head. They give a cadence for things like the push up hold. The description of this exercise says to “hold the position for the specified period of time” yet the actual routines don’t specify a period of time. Am I supposed to hold for 3 seconds or 30 or 90? Who knows?
Four, the routines — at least early on — take far too long and seem more like overtraining than training. In “Phase One” King prescribes circuit training and by week three you’re supposed to be doing this circuit 2-3 times per day, three days a week. I found that doing the circuit twice took me over an hour. Doing it a third time would have pushed me well over 90 minutes of exercise. Throw in warm up and post-work out stretching and you’re looking at a solid two hours. This is for “beginners” and they’re supposed to do it three times a week.
Later on in “Phase One” King piles even more work on that. Not only are you supposed to do each circuit 2-3 times, you’re supposed to do 2-3 reps of each exercise. In week 6, if you do the minimum number of reps, the minimum number of sets, the minimum number of circuits, all with the minimum recommended resting the whole thing will take you 93 minutes. Do that three times a week. This is for “beginners”.
While I like the workouts I think this kind of time commitment is more likely to lead to overtraining rather than useful gains. Admittedly later on it looks like King scales back the time requirements but you have to persevere through 8 weeks of workouts that are easily 90 minutes in length.
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|Excellent for any Level Ironhead,
Finally, Men’s Fitness has gotten it right – a book that does not promise immediate results…but instead one that helps you formulate a plan, that is equal part guide to the weightroom, solid nutritional advice, and key principals for involving the mind in your workout. This is without a doubt their best book yet on the value (and IMPORTANCE) of personal fitness.
Ian King may not be the best known name in the world of fitness, but among weightlifters, he is known for hard core, no-nonsense weight training, with functionality stressed over mere muscle mass. Along with Men’s Health regular Lou Schuler, they have compiled the best muscle guide to come out of Rodale Press – and one of the best guides I have ever read.
Along with showcasing the various muscle groups, and giving well explained details of their importance, the book goes on to spotlight various exercises for each group. What is nice about the exercise pages is that they show great variation in order to allow for full definition of the particular muscle, and also give great explanation and illustration for the exercise, allowing the reader the chance to really learn more about proper form. It’s great to read a book like that that uses pictures to explain and educate, rather than to have an excuse to photograph chiseled bodies in sweaty conditions.
This book has everything – whether you are a newcomer, or have been in the weightroom for years, you are bound to learn some new exercises, or some outstanding twists on some old favorites. And the sample programs written by King are well reasoned, and offer a creative mix of hypertrophic and endurance building routines. And they allow for customization to meet specific body part needs.
Great book guys – this has me thinking about subscribing to Men’s Health again (if only they would stop running the cheesy “pump up your sex life” articles).
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|you will gain muscle mass, which will make you heavier (since muscle weighs more than fat), but you’ll look sleeker. also, having more muscle will boost your metabolism.