Hydration: When Swimmers Run Out of Water

Earlier in this book, I promised you could become a very good swimmer with nothing more than your suit, cap, and goggles. No added equipment necessary.

Not quite. One piece of equipment should always be sitting on the deck at the end of your lane: your water bottle. It’s easy, and common, to mistakenly figure that because your sweat isn’t obvious, it’s not happening. But you not only sweat during a swim workout, you sweat copiously.

Prove it by weighing yourself before and after a workout. You’ve lost weight, of course, and it’s all water. Sweat losses of as little as 2 percent of your body weight (just 3 pounds for a 150-pound swimmer) can cut dramatically into your performance. In fact, dehydration is far more likely to slow you down than running out of muscle energy, making “water loading” even more important than carbo loading.

But plain water is not always the liquid of choice. A study by Dr. Jack Wilmore, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas, found that for workouts of less than an hour, nothing beats water. If you’re going longer, fluid replacement sports drinks that contain electrolytes (salts) are absorbed into your bloodstream faster than water, which means better performance and a faster recovery when you’re done.

Their formulas are all slightly different, so I can only repeat the standard coach’s advice: experiment. Some may agree with you and others may not. I found one that tastes good to me and sits well in my stomach, and I’ve noticed a marked boost during the second half of any seventy-five-minute workout since I’ve started using it.

The Smart Swimmer’s Drinking Rules

1. You can sweat off 6 to 8 ounces of fluid every fifteen minutes—yes, even in the pool. That’s a healthy swig from your water bottle every quarter hour.

2. Want to be more precise? Weigh yourself before and after a work-out. Each pound lost is a pint (16 ounces) of water gone out of you. Next time, bring that much in your water bottle(s).

3. Prehydrate. Drink 2 to 3 cups of water (16 to 24 ounces) about two hours before swimming and another 2 cups fifteen minutes before your workout.

4. Drink before you’re thirsty. Thirst means your body already needs water, so it’s too late to prevent dehydration. This is especially true for older swimmers, since after middle age we feel less thirsty as we dry out and the body’s warning signals can be overlooked.

Shedding Pounds in the Pool:
How to Swim to Burn the Most Fat

Is swimming an effective exercise for losing weight? It certainly is, despite all the theories to the contrary that have come and gone. We now know this: If you burn more calories than you eat, you will drop pounds—on an exercise bike, at the track, or in the pool. And swimming is one of the most comfortable ways to burn calories you’ll ever find.

So if slimming down by reducing body fat, improving your cholesterol count, and helping lower blood pressure are important goals for your exercise program, you’ve come to the right sport. And believe it or not, the best way to do all of that, plus improve your stroke technique, is with easy swimming, the keystone of Total Immersion swimming.

Research has proven that exercising moderately (at just 60 percent of your maximum heart rate) provides the same health benefits as hard work-outs as long as you cover the same distance. That’s health, mind you, in contrast to performance. Obviously, if you want to win a championship by swimming faster than everyone else, you’ll still have to do intense work. But it’s not an essential ingredient to keeping your cardiovascular system tuned up.

In a six-month study at the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas, a group of women who walked three miles daily at a slow pace gained the same health benefits as a group that walked the same distance much faster. In fact, walking burns just as many calories per mile as running. It just takes longer to cover the same distance.

Michael Pollock, Ph.D., director of the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Florida, found that slow walking was also just as effective as fast walking at reducing body fat, high blood pressure, and cholesterol. And at the Cooper Institute, the strollers actually lost more body fat than the power walkers.

None of this is surprising, since researchers have long known the best way to burn fat is to exercise at lower intensities for longer periods of time. Our bodies use two main fuels to supply energy: fats (which we’d like to burn more of) and carbohydrates (which our bodies, left to their own devices, would like to burn more of; carbohydrates are more efficient, after all). Long, easy practices are one way to get the body to draw a greater percentage of the energy it needs from fats than it would if you sped things up.

“The total amount of work you do ends up being the important factor,” says Pollock. “People can go slower. They just need to go longer to get the same results.”

Well, that’s certainly easy enough. If you swim a mile at an average pace of 1:30 per 100 yards, you’ll finish the practice in only 27 minutes. At 2:00 per 100 yards, you’ll be done in 36 minutes. But you obviously can’t cut back both pace and distance.

Less is less. Even the American College of Sports Medicine, which now advises that it’s okay to work at less than 60 percent of maximal capacity, stipulates that you must still do it long enough and frequently enough to get the benefit. For adult swimmers, this would mean about 6000 to 8000 yards of swimming a week, in three to four pool sessions.

So there’s nothing wrong with discovering that easing your pace a little makes it easier to get to the pool in the first place. Higher-intensity exercise programs inevitably suffer from higher dropout rates because people just don’t enjoy them and get frustrated when they can’t “measure up.” “By encouraging slower, more comfortable exercise,” says Dr. Pollock, “we’re giving people a reason to exercise rather than an excuse not to.”

No argument from me. After all, easy swimming is also the perfect pace for Total Immersion practice. You can do your drills and technique work and count your strokes per length much more effectively at low intensity than when you’re trying to burn up the pool.

Even interval training, normally done with a little more gusto, can become a “fat burner.” Just use a more relaxed pace. You won’t need much rest between repeats because your heart rate will stay fairly even at moderate paces, but even brief rests are beneficial—especially for adult swimmers—since they control the levels of fatigue-producing lactic acid that accumulates in muscles and the bloodstream. That in turn means less stiffness and soreness after your workout. And interval repeats with their built-in rest periods help the heart supply more blood, oxygen, and nutrients to joints and muscles, reducing your chance of hurting something.

But how fast is “slow enough”? To calculate your easygoing, pound-dropping, health-building clip for intervals, multiply your best 100-yard time by anywhere from 1.25 to 1.5. So if your best time is 1:20, you’ll be right on target at a pace between 1:40 and 2:00 per 100. Plan on ten to twenty seconds of rest between swims. And if you’re doing stroke drills rather than straight swimming, your times will naturally fall in the upper part of the range. Use the same formula to figure your pace for repeats of other distances. Or just follow the Total Immersion practices in the appendix. Done as suggested, they work well as both stroke builders and fat burners.

To enjoy the optimum fat-burning benefit, just add enough repeats or sets to allow for at least an hour in the pool. But as you do so, keep in mind the potential conflict between longer sessions (to burn more fat) and quality skill work (to become a better swimmer). If you can’t maintain good form for an hour or more, you may have to choose one priority over another. If it’s becoming a better swimmer, don’t stretch the practice to the point where fatigue hurts your form, just so you can burn a few more calories. Instead add thirty minutes of walking or biking or treadmill or exercise bike or anything that simply burns calories and fat but doesn’t depend on maintaining good form.