Functional Strength Training

Many swimmers are tempted to think they can overpower the water by bulking up. But water, being a fluid medium, just doesn’t respond to sheer power. The water’s resistance will always surpass any strength you can apply and, besides, it takes a special kind of strength, accurately applied, to overcome the water’s resistance.

The world’s best swimmers don’t have bulky or highly defined muscles. The strength that produces world records, as well as helping anyone to swim efficiently, fluently, and enjoyably is more like that exhibited by the slim, graceful cables that hold up the Brooklyn Bridge than by the brutes who heft enormous poundage in weight-lifting competitions. Which is not to say that conventional weight lifting has no value for swimmers. Anyone beyond their middle thirties should do some form of resistance training twice a week, purely for health, according to the American College of Sports Medicine. If you do go to a gym, rather than focus on “swimming-specific muscles,” ask a trainer to help plan a program of compound/complex exercises for general strength development.

What is probably of greatest value to your swimming is “functional strength,” the kind that makes us more robust in everything from spading the garden to shoveling the walk to swimming 1500 meters. And that means training muscles and joints to work as they do when we move—multiple muscle groups, multiple joints, and complex planes of movement, all at once. This is because fast swimming isn’t produced by muscling your way through the water, but by maintaining body positions that minimize drag and connect the propelling armstrokes to the power of the core body’s “kinetic chain.” That kind of strength is developed by practicing challenging movements that teach torso and arm/shoulder muscles to work together. Since my mid-forties, I’ve begun the regular practice of yoga, which I’ve found to be a more integrated form of exercise than a myriad of other activities each focused on something different, like, say weight lifting, situps, and stretching.

My yoga practice feels utterly functional for swimming because it teaches me to use my body as a system, working all muscle groups in unison, against the resistance of gravity and my own inflexibility to build strength and flexibility with each movement. Exercises such as push-ups, pull-ups, dips, step-ups, and squats, done with just the weight of your own body, also develop muscle sense and joint stability, letting tendons and ligaments adapt rather than being overwhelmed as they sometimes are by machines or external weight.

Especially critical to functional strength is “core strength,” which means strength in the abdominal muscles, spinal rotators and erectors, hip flexors, the glutes, and more. If your core isn’t strong, then neither are you, because your torso is the force coupler that transmits power from legs to upper body. Abdominal exercises of all sorts, and particularly Pilates exercises develop core power. I take Pilates classes with a certified instructor and practice on my own with the aid of a book. (See resources for more information on yoga and Pilates.)