Swimming Exercise For Fitness

Swimming Exercise Must Be Specific To Your Goals

Swimming exercise is excellent for overall fitness. Aerobic endurance, power, strength, and flexibility are all enhanced by swimming exercise.

However, training must be specific for the anticipated environment, including cold water acclimatization. This section will give you the tools to improve your swimming skills, thus enhancing your fitness for related swimmer events.

You must primarily train for endurance while preserving the significant power and strength required by other phases of any event you are participating in.

This section includes information on competitive swimming strokes and swimming exercise training, but it is important to emphasize that most swimming fitness exercises should consist of open water swims with fins.

Open water swimming fitness and exercise training is essential as a part of a comprehensive training program under the general principle of "specificity of training". Surf and high sea state swimming provides specific training for potential situations by increasing your sense of timing and confidence.

Pool swimming fitness and exercise training: Building Strength and Endurance
The major reason to use a pool is the quality of swimming exercise training. Swim sessions may be closely monitored and are safe. Controlled interval workouts used in pool training swimming exercise sessions provide good feedback; the pace clock doesn't lie.

Pool sessions allow you to design workouts that vary in intensity and emphasis, which is not possible in open water. Pool training and acquisition of improved stroke skills are elective elements of a good training program.

Pool training will increase your comfort level in open water, thus enabling you to significantly improve your swimming capabilities.

Swimming exercise is not an intuitive activity like running.

Warming Up
Warming-up for swimming fitness and exercise should consist of at least 400 meters of swimming, along with some kicking and pulling drills. Warming-up is essential for swimming fitness and exercise to avoid developing problems of the shoulder joint and upper back.

Target heart rate during warm-up should be about 60% of maximal.

During your warm-up, work on efficient stroke "stealth" swimming! Warming-up is an appropriate time to include stroke drills. This serves the purpose of providing stroke patterning along with the warm-up.

Basic Principles of Interval Training
You need to concentrate on exercises for swimming that will enhance endurance: interval swim training will allow this to happen. Interval training sets (for both strength and endurance) are generally comprised of repeated, swims lasting 45 seconds to 4 minutes.

Basics of interval exercises for swimming include the following:

• Swim at a slow to moderate pace for five to ten minutes to warm-up muscles and cardiorespiratory system.

• Anaerobic training, sets should be performed until repeat times can no longer be held. There is no magical number of repetitions for a set, but the distance is typically 50 to 100 meters, or a time of about 45 seconds.

• Swimming exercise at a prescribed intensity pace for as long as possible is most important. When desired pace can no longer be sustained, the set should be terminated,

• Work: recovery ratios play an important part in the type of adaptation that occurs. A 1:1 work recovery ratio would be to swim 45 seconds and rest 45 seconds, whereas a 1:2 ratio would be to swim 45 seconds and rest 90 seconds.

  To stimulate endurance adaptations, recovery intervals between exercises for swimming repetitions should be less than 30 seconds. For maximum benefit, it is best to keep the interval less than 15 seconds.

• For anaerobic adaptations to occur, recovery intervals should be in excess of one minute and up to at least twice the duration, of the repetition swim. These effects occur independent of the repetition distance or pace,

• The longer the rest interval, irrespective of the distance being repeated, the greater the use of the anaerobic system. With long rests, it takes considerably longer for the aerobic energy system to be reactivated.

  Short rest intervals keep the aerobic system functioning, particularly during initial recovery.

Interval training is the backbone of swimming exercise.

Varying Your Workout
Swimming workouts should be varied between easy days and hard days. For competitive speed, it is good to swim at least four days a week; this will help keep stroke efficiency.

Swimming exercise days provide good relief for tight muscles generated by running and weight training.

Swimming exercise has some specialized weight training techniques. The primary issue is that swimmers have full range of motion of their arms during exertion.

Muscle contraction is fairly constant over the entire arm motion requiring balanced power throughout. Weight training must complement this fact, or muscle tightness develops that actually works against the swimmer.

Pulley pulls are excellent weight training techniques for a swimmer. The classic is the lat pull-down station present in virtually all weight rooms and multi-station machines. A better arrangement is for weights and pulley setups to be individualized for each hand.

Pulley pulls are "isotonic" and mimic the constant resistance of water. Weights should be kept on the low side, permitting high speed weightlifting of between 1-1.5 seconds per repetition.

Hold slightly at the end of each lift to prevent banging weights and getting thrown out of the weight room. Swimmers use high reps, never less than 10.

Developing Stroke Skills
Basic swimming exercise stroke mechanics will prohibit you from increasing your respiratory rate (except during backstroke). Because you can't pant, you will quickly become limited by not getting enough oxygen or not getting rid of carbon dioxide before it starts building up.

This is different than in running and is the reason for the universal use of interval training in swimming exercise programs. Runners often go out for long steady runs, but a swimmer who trains this way becomes a slow and inefficient swimmer.

While swimming exercise may be a long, slow activity, it is best for you to acquire a broad base of swimming skills. This will increase your efficiency during any type of swimming exercise.

This section will discuss three main swimming exercise strokes; crawl stroke (usually called freestyle or "free"), breaststroke, and sidestroke. These particular strokes are the most useful to you.

Most swimmers use a variety of strokes in a workout to provide swimming exercise cross training and avoid overuse injuries. Skills must be developed over a long period of time in order for the swimmer to become proficient.

Good stroke mechanics are not only necessary to develop speed; injury may occur in swimmers from poor technique.

A proper stroke may only be developed by getting feedback from others. This factor makes a buddy system or partner coaching an essential component of your training program. Obtain periodic stroke coaching from a qualified instructor - no matter how good you are.

General Stroke Principles
Water causes a large amount of drag on the swimmer's body, thus streamlining becomes extremely important. The key to fast swimming exercise is reducing drag as much as possible while maximizing propulsive forces.

One specific swimming exercise technique includes rolling from side to side to clear high resistance parts of the swimmer's body for arm recovery.

Swimming exercise in salt water is faster than swimming exercise in fresh water because of the increased buoyancy of the swimmer, reducing resistance.

There are many other subtle ways to reduce water drag in swimming fitness and exercise, and learning them is one of the benefits of getting coaching from a qualified instructor or swimming coach.

Fin Drills
Kicking with fins is fantastic swimming fitness and exercise training. Be careful of using a kickboard too much while training with fins; this may cause back pain.

Sidestroke swimming fitness and exercise is good but you will need lane lines and flags to prevent careening off course and acquiring a nice scalp laceration. The mainstay of kicking strokes is still prone flutterkick.

Fin kicking drills are essential to building leg strength and specific training for swimmer duties. These drills are effective when imbedded within a pool swimming workout where there are swimming sets that accentuate arm and chest muscle training.

This is because the swimmer's legs will be warmed up but relatively fresh and ready for a strenuous workout with fins. Use high numbers of repeats in sets, 10-12, with relatively short rest intervals of 10-15 seconds.

A total set length of around 10 minutes is optimal; any longer and the set begins to degrade into a long, slow distance set which is best done in. open water.

Fin Sprints:
Sprinting 25 meters with fins will allow you to feel flaws in your arm strokes. This drill will consume an extraordinary amount of oxygen and provide a good anaerobic and strength workout for your legs. It also feels great to go fast.

Fin Fartlek:
Do this set without a kickboard Kick one length with an easy flutter kick, then flutterkick the next length on your right side with both hands out of the water - effort level high - then back to face down for a length of easy flutter kick, then back at it over a hard length, this time on your left side, again hands out of the water.

Repeat several times. This swimming drill is particularly effective in a long pool (45m).

Fin Repeats:
Do with a kickboard. Kick flutterkick hard for 50m, rest 10 seconds, repeat for 10 repetitions.

Other Specific Freestyle Drills

• One Arm Freestyle: May be done with or without a pull-buoy. Emphasizes body rolling without corkscrewing. This drill will allow the swimmer to concentrate on proper pulling technique.

• Catch-Up Freestyle: Hold arm out in front while pulling with the other arm. Recover the pulling arm and then touch hands out in front before initiating the pull with the other arm. This drill will help timing of pull.

• Fist Freestyle: Swim with fists. This will make the swimmer concentrate on forearm sculling. Do this drill without the pull-buoy.

• Finger Drag Freestyle: Recover arm with fingers skimming the water. This provides the swimmer with feedback regarding arm and hand position during arm recovery.

Do you use any unique and effective exercises or in your fitness program? What was your experience with these exercises? What results did you notice? Do you have a good or a bad story to tell about your own experience with certain exercises? Or do you have some good information that we may have missed? Let others know!

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