The drawbacks of high volume training
High-volume training can severely compromise your competitive performance in two major ways:
• Depletion of glycogen muscle stores
• Fatigue and depletion of fast-twitch muscle fibres
Here are the facts, as laid out in Strength Training for Swimmers:
Glycogen: since glycogen is the only fuel available for sustained high-intensity muscle contractions, it is essential for good swim performance. If you want to achieve PB’s in competition, then your glycogen stores must be full. Continued high-volume training can compromise this, reducing the quality of your important high-intensity training workouts.
Fast twitch muscle fibres: periods of high-volume training reduce the force production in the fast-twitch muscle fibres, essential for the high muscle power required to produce the fastest swim speeds. Swimmers have a high proportion of fast-twitch fibres and high-volume training can change these into slow-twitch types.
You’ll learn how certain Olympic swimmers succeed by increases their distance per stroke rather than the stroke frequency during a competitive event, learning how to enhance power at race speeds by imitating the training of middle distance and long-sprint track athletes.
Next, you’ll maximise your anaerobic capacity by alternating easy lactate-threshold pace in the morning and very high-quality race-pace, and faster than race-pace, interval workouts in the evening.
Why this strength-training programme can really boost results
For maximum impact on results, the exercises contained in Strength Training for Swimmers replicate your movements in competition. Here, for example, are the exercises given for the front crawl:
Arm pull down exercises:
• Cable rotational front and back pulls: boosts forward propulsion by training the internal rotator cuff muscles by replicating the arm ‘pull down’ through the water.
• Rear pulls: promotes balanced strength around the shoulder joint by training the external muscles. This technique avoids shoulder injuries and helps train your core stability skills.
• Medicine ball single arm overhead throw: develops the power of the latissimus and pectoral muscles to improve the rate of force development in the shoulder by accelerating the arm hard. The focus is on producing the power from the shoulder and pulling across the body as you do in the crawl.
• Swiss ball body pulls: helps to develop core and shoulder strength. A closed kinetic chain movement where the moving limbs remain in contact with a fixed object, is regarded as particularly functional for sports performance. Uses the stomach muscles to support the spine, using a strong pull of the shoulder muscles to raise your body back to the parallel position.
Leg kick exercises
• Hip extension and flexion kick: each leg is worked independently to increase the specificity for swimming. Mimics the upward and downward phases of the swimmers kick action, where the glutes and hamstrings extend and the hip flexors flex the leg at the hip.
Dive start and push-off turn exercise
• Barbell squat jumps: improves vertical jump performance by involving dynamic extension of the ankle, knee and hip joints and trains the calf, quadriceps and gluteal muscles. Helps you generate peak power by adding weight to the squat, so when you perform the jump squat with body weight only, the jump will be very fast and high.
• The dive start and push off turn: involves dynamic ankle, knee and hip extension.
While the above exercises focus solely for the front crawl for illustrative purposes, you’ll read how to design your own strength training programme for your particular even, in terms of mechanics, positions and speed. You’ll learn how to focus only on exercises using the right muscles in a related mechanical movement to provide optimum training benefit.
Strokes
The efficiency of your swimming stroke is the key to success as a competing or training swimmer. An efficient stroke will significantly reduce wasted energy output through less drag in the water and a cleaner execution of hand and arm entry and recovery.
By holding the technique to the last tenth of a second, the result will be an overall faster time. We provide techniques for freestyle, backstroke, butterfly and breastroke.
What should be practiced...
Endurance: basic endurance; threshold endurance; overload endurance
Sprint: lactate tolerance; lactate production.
Proverbs 14:23
All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.
James 2:17
In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
