Types of strength for swimmers

Swimming is not a sport that gives immediate gratification. When a person comes into competitive swimming without a base of athleticism, a great deal of time and energy must be devoted to building that base, to prepare the person to take on the rigors of training for competitive swimming. In contrast, when these qualities are already present, a swimmer is able to excel faster. A swimmer who comes into swimming with an athletic base in place is able to concentrate on developing solid swimming skills, gaining swimming experience, and swimming fast.

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Importance of core stability in swimming

Balancing and maintaining a streamlined body position are critical in swimming. Being able to control your body improves efficiency and allows swimmers to move through the water with minimal resistance. To achieve this position however, swimmers need to have strength and control of the muscles through the middle part of their body – the area known as core. This muscles in short are: the erector spinae muscles, the internal and external oblique muscles, the transverse abdominis, the rectus abdominis, and many other muscles that attach to and control the pelvis and spine, such as those that flex and extend the hip.

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Guidelines for power training

Training for power places greater demands on the body that training for muscular endurance, and it is important not to overstress the body when focusing on power development. Keep in mind that in this case, quality is more important than quantity. When your swimmers are ready to build up power, you, as a coach, should take several safety and performance considerations into account as you set up your programme. From the safety perspective, you should be aware of these issues:

• Perform explosive exercises at the start of a workout (just after the warm up) while your athletes are still fresh. Fatigued muscles can negatively affect technique and cause injury. Fatigue also limits the gains you can expect to achieve.
• Set up your training programme using exercise progressions so that exercise increase in complexity and intensity as your swimmers become more experienced with this type of exercises.
• Power exercises are meant primarily for physical mature athletes. Younger swimmers can easily handle low level plyometric exercises, such as jumping rope, but swimmers should avoid moderate and high intensity exercises until they have gone through puberty.

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Muscular endurance training for swimmers

Strength training can be viewed as a form of cross training (activities other than swimming that help maintain your conditioning) since it provides a different way to stimulate and challenge the body above and beyond what you achieve in the pool. However, when building muscular endurance, be sure to approach it in the right way. Muscular endurance refers to a muscle’s ability to generate a relatively high level of force repeatedly without fatigue. This is important in every swimming race, especially for distance longer than 100 m.

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Foundational and swimming-specific strength

Strength training should be geared to developing the specific attributes a swimmer needs in order to race fast. Before listing a few of the strength exercises that can be used by swimmers I’ll help you understand two basic concepts of strength training. These are the concepts of foundational and swimming-specific strength.

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