Articles and Videos
How Triathletes Can Do a Swimming-Specific Taper for Their Big Race
You can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel as you approach the end of an arduous and dutiful training season for your big triathlon finale. With so many options and opinions on the “correct” way to taper for proper culmination of your season, you may feel rightfully conflicted. Add to that the confounding variable that is the three separate sports within triathlon. So, what’s a triathlete to do?
Don’t Do Swimming-Specific Exercises
Swimming is different from other sports in many ways. Therefore, it might seem to make sense to create a dryland training program centered on a swimming-specific program, even specializing in a certain stroke or race distance. However, this approach can lead to the craziest looking exercises, with swimmers desperately trying to mimic the exact movements of a particular swimming stroke. This can lead to frustration or, worse, injury.
Can I Swim After a Reverse Shoulder Replacement?
Strong, flexible shoulders are the quintessential characteristic of a good swimmer. But the shoulder, a particularly agile joint that allows you to move your arm through several planes of motion, can be fragile. Many swimmers know all too well how easy it can be to injure a shoulder, especially with the repetitive movements required in our sport.
What Does ‘Swimmer’s Body’ Mean?
Swimming also has a preferred body type that’s related to the physics of boosting power while reducing drag through water, or hydrodynamics. Literally any body can be a “swimmer’s body” (and should!) but when talking about high performance or elite-level swimmers, the term “swimmer’s body” takes on a specific meaning.
How Runners and Cyclists Can Become Natural Swimmers
Are you principally a runner or a cyclist and getting the feeling that maybe your body just doesn’t work for swimming? Do you get frustrated and discouraged when you see swimmers who seem to have invisible and effortless proficiency? There are very specific adaptations that go into swimming efficiently, but they can be learned. If you’re from a different athletic background, you need to take the time to analyze them and try to apply them retroactively.
Try These Workouts While Waiting to Get Back Into the Water
Swimming is so much more than just an essential life skill. It’s an exceptional cardiorespiratory workout that comes without excessive stress on your joints. But if your pool is closed for an indefinite amount of time, you need a way to try to stay in “swim shape,” so that it’ll be easier to resume your workout regimen when you can get back in the water.
Three In-Water Exercises for Core Strengthening
Here are three ways to work your core in the pool to strengthen and, more importantly, train your core in a swim-specific manner.
How to Tell If Your Feet and Hips are Sinking While You're Swimming and How to Fix It
Without getting into too many specifics about fluid mechanics and the laws of physics, it’s safe to say that if your feet and hips are low, they produce more drag. More drag needs more propulsion to overcome the drag, and more propulsion requires more energy. In short, sinking hips and feet make you less efficient and slower.
How to Write a Swimming Workout
Becoming a better swimmer requires effective training. Whether you train yourself or are responsible for providing training for others, success requires workouts that progressively improve technique, fitness, and psychological strength. While USMS offers a huge library of great workouts written by expert coaches, crafting your own workouts lets you fine-tune a training plan for your specific situation. This article outlines things to consider on your journey toward becoming a workout writing wizard.
What Equipment New Swimmers Need to Start Swimming and How to Care for It
When you join a Masters group, of course you know to bring suit, goggles, cap, and towel. But there are some other pieces of basic training equipment that will both enhance your training and help your swimming evolve. There are other pieces of equipment that are specific to a certain level of training and caliber of athlete. How do you know what’s best for starting out? Here’s a list of the basic items that most programs use and why they help or enhance your training.
What Open Water Swimmers Need to Know About Swimming in Fresh Water and Salt Water
Just as all politics are local, all potential open water issues are dependent on the environment you’re swimming in and, more specifically, the type of water you’re swimming in.
Five Ways Pool-Based Snorkel Training Can Make You a Better Open Water Swimmer
For many people the concept of a snorkel brings to mind Caribbean fish-spotting sessions. For open water swimmers, however, a snorkel can be an important part of your gear bag when training in the pool. Specifically, a center-mount snorkel that’s intended mainly for freestyle training can help you improve your open water swimming in at least five ways.
Five Swimming Kick Sets
Some swimmers enjoy kicking. Some do not. But all swimmers benefit from understanding how their legs contribute and from doing specific sets to enhance that contribution.
How Triathletes Should Spend Their Offseason
The triathlon offseason affords you the opportunity to evaluate your aptitude as a swimmer. You will have much more to gain from your swimming workouts in-season by continually assessing the effectiveness of your abilities. In order to get the most out of technique drills and pace training, you must be reasonably conditioned specifically for swimming, what competitive swimmers often refer to being “in shape.” It’s not enough to be generally aerobically conditioned—you could be able to run five-minute miles and still be floundering in the pool. Getting in swim shape necessarily involves some rudimentary skill review, especially if you’ve never had much swimming instruction.
How to Adjust Your Triathlon Training Plan Mid-Season
You’ve embarked on a triathlon season with the best intention of maintaining a training regimen for your race schedule and goals. You may have even chosen the periodization training scheme to ensure that you’ll develop endurance, taper, and peak at the right time for a specific race distance. But as often happens, life has gotten in the way of your plans. Does this mean that your season is over? Not necessarily.
Try This Method for Achieving Your Goals
There are countless articles on goal setting and accomplishment, so what makes this one different? Good question. This one looks specifically at adult athletes who are swimmers and leaves out all of the psychological stuff that’s mentioned elsewhere. To be sure, that’s all good stuff. Red Tide swimmer Marty Munson wrote a great article on goal-setting strategy, and I highly recommend you read it. Once you’ve digested all of that, especially the stuff about SMART goals, it comes down to a matter of how to get from where you are to where you want to be. The answer is simple: Start at the finish.
Embrace the Pace
Being a clock watcher in your office is probably a sign that you’re not loving your job. But in the pool, learning to use the pace clock is an important part of becoming a better swimmer. Here are five specific benefits you’ll earn:
Synchronizing Kick and Stroke
Observers of elite swimming have noted that some of the fastest freestylers are flattening out—rotating less—specifically in the hips. This is especially true for the sprinters, who tend to drive their stroke with a flat kick, rotating only their upper bodies.
U.S. Masters Swimming Partners with INFINIT Nutrition
Cincinnati, Ohio and Sarasota, Fla., March 21, 2016—INFINIT Nutrition and U.S. Masters Swimming announce a unique partnership that includes the creation of a custom line of sports drinks formulated specifically to meet the needs of Masters swimmers.
Train Your Swimmers to be Average
I was recently talking to a Masters swimmer who had some questions about his dryland and strength training program. He wanted to know how to get stroke-specific with his program and hopefully improve more in the water.
