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Dryland Exercises to Improve Your Freestyle
Dive into this dryland session focused on helping your freestyle. The technique areas targeted are lower-body power for your walls and kick, upper-body strength to help manage the pulling volume, and core work to maximize your body position in the water.
Maximize Your Breaststroke with This Dryland Workout
Breaststroke requires a unique balance of power, timing, and body position. With a few exercises focused on training these key attributes, you can use dryland training to help improve your efficiency in the water. When you build strength and power (and use proper technique) you reduce chance of injury, so this routine will also help you avoid groin pulls.
Dryland Exercises to Improve Your Breaststroke
Breaststroke requires a unique balance of power, timing, and body position. With a few exercises focused on training these key attributes, your dryland training can improve your efficiency in the water. We’ll also focus on a few exercises that can help you avoid feeling uncomfortable groin pulls that can surface during breaststroke.
Improve Your Backstroke With This Dryland Workout
Backstrokers must be able to exert strength with their body stretched out and have good body awareness. Being able to focus on the form of each stroke and where you are in the pool is a challenge that takes time to master. Here’s a dryland workout geared toward helping your body position and strength.
Improve Your Butterfly With This Dryland Workout
Swimming butterfly requires power, rhythm, and body position. If you're missing one of these ingredients, this stroke can become an immense challenge.
Get Ready to Swim With This Dryland Warm-up
How many times have you showed up to swim practice feeling a world of tension stemming from your day? You might note a tight shoulder or knee pain while standing on deck, though you might hop in the water and hope to work out the kinks during your warm-up.
Three Dryland Tests for Improved Swimming
When it comes to making your dryland workouts effective for you, doing some simple tests can unearth your strengths and weaknesses for a better path forward. By completing these tests, you can build your athleticism and improve your weaknesses, which can result in injury reduction and more efficient swimming.
Build Strength and Power With These Dryland Exercises for Freestylers
It’s an exciting time with pools starting to reopen across the country. You’re probably bursting with excitement to make your return. As you do, carve out adequate time to properly warm up before entering the water to keep aches and pains away. Even once you’re back up to full steam, a warm-up prepares your body and mind for the upcoming training and will help you minimize ineffective strokes that can be present at the start of a swim workout.
Dryland Exercises to Improve Your Breaststroke
Breaststroke is the most fascinating stroke to work on in drylands because of its complexity. Swimming breaststroke requires an interesting blend of power, position, and patience. A rushed stroke results in a swimming-in-place feeling, and a delayed stroke results in missing out on momentum during a race. Breaststroke also causes some headaches—rather, knee aches—from an injury perspective. Not only do you need a proper range of motion, you need strength throughout that range of motion.
Dryland Exercises to Improve Your Backstroke
Whether you love to race backstroke at your local Masters meet or use it to recover in your IM events, here are some helpful dryland tips to get more out of the stroke.
Dryland Exercises to Improve Your Butterfly Technique
Here’s how you can improve your mobility and strength to fly like an eagle.
Drylands for Swimmers
Masters swimmers are interesting creatures. These typically early risers hit the pool before many sane people would consider waking up, let alone exercising. Masters swimmers commonly come in three forms:
Plyometric Dryland Training
Looking for an edge over your competition when poised on the starting block and the gun goes off? Are your flip turns and push-offs lackluster and weak instead of razor sharp and explosive? Wouldn’t it be great if you could incorporate an exercise out of the water to increase your power off the starting block as well as ensure quick and explosive turns? If your answer to any of these questions is a definitive “yes,” then plyometrics may very well be your solution.
Are Drylands Really Worth It?
Watch any age group swim team and the majority will moan when the coach says: “Okay, time for drylands.” They fuss and are slow at getting out of the water. They even say under their breath, “I’d rather continue swimming.” If you thought I was talking about the little kids, you are right, but I was also talking about the big kids… Masters swimmers.
Taper Time: Adjusting Your Dryland Training
We are fast approaching that time of year when many Masters swimmers will be competing in their main focus meets, whether that is state championships, zones or perhaps even short course nationals. Most experienced competitors know that this time of year means that they get to enter the "taper" phase of training and adjust their workouts to achieve peak performance. It is not only very important at this time to adjust what we do in the water, but it is equally as important to adjust what we are doing in our dryland cross-training. For me, the number one rule for dryland at this time of year is do nothing new, nothing you are not already doing and nothing you are not accustomed to. As you swim less and begin feeling rested, it is tempting to use all of your extra energy in creative ways. Don't. To quote a leading sage of Masters swimming, Ande Rasmussen, "Don't do stupid stuff. If anything begins with ‘Hey, watch this!" it's probably a very bad idea."What you can do to begin resting your body is to lower the resistance and number of repetitions in your exercises, but, at the same time, slightly accelerate the motion to keep the nervous system stimulated. This is not the time to reach your failure point, but the time to end your dryland session feeling powerful and energized. This is also the one time where it does make sense to adjust your routines to become more swimming specific, i.e. focusing on those exercises that more closely mimic swimming motions. When do you stop dryland altogether before the big meet? This is very individualized, but most coaches agree men generally need more rest than women, especially men who are more heavily muscled. Personally, I do nothing too strenuous for at least three weeks before my main focus meet and my last light lift is about 10 days out. However, I know some very successful swimmers that like to lift fairly heavily very close to the meet. Remember, you're in this for the long haul and each season is a learning experience. Record what you're doing, see how well you swim and how good you feel and adjust accordingly for next season.
Dryland Training: A Nonspecific Approach
As a general rule, if you want to go fast in a race, your training should mimic the conditioning and technique required by your focus events. For example, the type of energy required to swim a 50 meter race is very different from the type of energy required for 1,500 meters. The technique required for breaststroke is very different from those needed for freestyle. The emphasis of your in-water training should be specific to whatever events you want to excel in. Does this methodology apply to dryland training
The Purpose of Dryland Training
This month's topic is "Dry Land" training. The term "Dry Land" has an interesting connotation. It differs from Cross Training as the latter refers to something we do instead of swimming for general athletic conditioning whereas the former is something we do to augment our swim training and strengthen the swimming specific muscles.
Three Pull Dryland Exercises Better than Pull-Ups
When we're talking swimming, we know pulling is important. Being able to grip the water and pull yourself forward is critical for both performance-based goals and just pure enjoyment of the sport.
Great Dryland and Core Exercise for Swimmers: Weighted Circles
Strong shoulders and core muscles are key to any swimmer’s success, and this exercise can help build both.
Three Swim Dryland Exercises for Improved Overhead Range of Motion
Swimming requires its practitioners to spend a lot of time reaching overhead, but sometimes that can cause your mid-back to tighten up. This in turn can force the lower back to take over in managing that overhead reach, which can cause further pain and discomfort.
