Resistance training has been the corner stone of physical and athletic development for decades. Once the potential for increased performance in sports was realized and harnessed, researchers, strength coaches and the world audience alike have yet ceased to be amazed at the athletic feats some have achieved as a result of proper strength and conditioning.

Despite the countless benefits that swim-specific strength based training has for both the athletic and non athletic populations, misconceptions and misinformation abound. This being the case, especially in the swimming community, many coaches and parents are found saying things like “I don’t want my swimmers to get big and bulky” or better yet “they’re swimmers not football players”. With such ideas floating around, being a strength and conditioning professional presents itself with an inherent challenge of building buy-in.

In this blog post we are going to touch on 5 (of the many) benefits of swim-specific strength training. As there are many more ways to skin the cat, you’ll just have to stay tuned for future blog posts for a continued discussion.

INJURY PREVENTION

Regardless of the sport you participate in, you may at least know someone who has had an injury that either jeopardized their season or even their careers in the sport they love, if not yourself. As a strength coach we wear many hats, one being the ‘investigator’. One specific question would be, “Do you have any injuries I should know about?”. Let’s be honest, there are many individuals both within the athletic realm and general population, that have caused themselves great anguish pushing past old nagging injuries making them worse or creating new ones by un-intelligent lifting habits. So, the question arises, should something that causes so many people further pain and injury be used then to also prevent those very injuries from happening in the first place?

The answer is a big fat YES. Much investigation goes into finding out why someone was injured in the first place. Was it due shoveling your driveway for a single bout of 5 hours in the dead of winter despite not even having an accumulated time of 5 hours in the gym working on your strength and flexibility? Or was it due to an unsupervised (by a professional and your lifting body doesn’t count) strength training routine where you focused subconsciously on muscles you enjoy training rather than muscles you should be training, resulting in nagging overuse injuries?

Wherever you find yourself on this spectrum, strength training should be viewed as the ability to prepare a Wolf Gang Puck quality meal. Yes we all can go to the grocery store and buy mostly the same ingredients yet the meal we prepare will vary greatly from chef to chef. Strength training should follow an intelligent fact finding and planning period, and only then are you set up for success.

In a nut shell – ask yourself either of these two simple questions:

Am I currently experiencing symptoms of an overuse or traumatic injury?
I currently have no inures limiting my performance, but, am I injury prone?

Competitive swimming requires much from the human body and so how much can I really push my body even further in the weight room? Without getting into too many specifics, simply put, fortifying the skeletomuscular system by increasing it’s resiliency to imposed demand will greatly affect the body’s ability to prevent injury before it happens. The better the suspension is on your car, the smoother the ride and longer the life of the car.

Here is an example of an assessment for shoulder mobility:

IMPROVED REACTION TIME & COORDINATION

We’ve all seen that one all star swimmer who is as efficient and fish-like in the water as humanly possible at his or her age and skill level, yet one step onto “dry-land”, walking in a straight line seems to be the extent of their athletic abilities. There seems to be a huge disconnect between the pocket knife like skill a swimmer in the water compared to the need to be like a Swiss army knife outside of the water. Being a “Jack of all trades, but master of none” actually takes on a different context here. Experienced/Elite level Swimmers go from mermaids and mermen in the water to what looks like that one scene in Bambi where he first learns to walk.

Much of a well rounded dryland program from youth to college to Masters, is focused on increasing the general coordination and overall functionality of their body. The times where we played tag, soccer, basketball, dodgeball and numerous other neighborhood games just for the heck of it are less and less common, and it shows.

Not only does acclimating an athletes overall body awareness help them in other aspects of life but will increase their central nervous system’s ability to adapt and learn new techniques in the water essentially making them a better swimmer, a win-win for both swimmer and swim coach.

Sometimes as a coach (not just a strength coach) we are required and often expected to makes leaps and bounds in improvement with our athletes and too often do we receive them into our care with no prior training/experience, making our task that much more interesting…Keep Reading