TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Pace Clock

To get the most out of your training, you will want to learn how to read a pace clock. It’s very easy, especially for those of us who grew up before digital watches. Nowadays most pools are graced with a big pace clock, with large, black second and minute hands (see Figure 14.1); some pools have two of them, one at each end. Since much of your training will consist of timed swims, including interval sets, you will need to know how to use the clock, so take a few minutes to acquaint yourself with it.

  Later in this chapter we’ll discuss interval training in detail.

For now, let’s say you are doing a set consisting of five 200-yard swims in which you begin each swim every three and a half minutes (5 × 200 on 3:30). You start the set when the second hand is “on the 60” or “on top”—that is, when it is pointing straight up. Your first 200 takes 2:50. You will start the next 200 “on the 30,” giving you forty seconds of rest.

Kick Board

One of the most important pieces of training equipment you will use is the kick board. Rectangular in shape, with rounded edges, kick boards usually are made of a light, buoyant material. They vary in size, but most often are about twenty by ten inches, large enough to maintain your body position while you are kicking but small enough to handle easily.

A kick board is used when you want to concentrate solely on your kick. Grip the board about two thirds of the way up, one hand on each side (see Figure 14.2). If you grip the board too near the bottom, your legs will tend to sink. If you grip the top, your body will lie on the board, and your buttocks and feet will come out of the water, an unnatural position for swimming.

Kicking is an important part of swimming technique, and swimmers find using a kick board, which supports you in the water as you practice kicking technique, an excellent way to tone leg muscles fast. Isolating the leg muscles while maintaining proper body position, a kick board allows you to build leg strength and improve your technique. In addition, because the leg muscles have such bulk and are so far from the heart, the heart must pump a large volume of blood to supply them with oxygen, and this raises your heart rate, an essential element of any aerobic workout.

Do not be discouraged if when you first use a kick board you seem to be making little headway through the water for the energy you are expending. Progress will come quickly if you keep at it. A good friend of mine wanted to incorporate kicking into her exercise program to firm up her thighs and buttocks. The first day it seemed to take her forever to kick one lap of the pool (twenty-five yards). Indeed, if I hadn’t been there to encourage her, she might have given up. The next day she kicked two laps, with a short rest between them, and each lap was considerably faster than the one that had been so agonizing the day before. On the third day she made two laps without resting. By the end of two weeks, she was kicking sixteen laps without resting.

Pull Buoy

Pull buoys are used for arms-only swimming, or “pulling.” Although they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, most pull buoys are made of a light, buoyant, foamy material and consist of two small cylinders (usually five to seven inches in length and about thirteen inches in circumference) connected by an adjustable cord (see Figure 14.3).

You will use a pull buoy when you want to concentrate solely on your arms, either to improve your stroke technique or to increase the stress on your arms and shoulders to strengthen them. Pull buoys are often used in conjunction with other pieces of equipment, such as hand paddles and drag suits.

Place the buoy between your thighs and grip it tightly. Then, simply stroke with your arms without kicking your feet. Because the buoy is buoyant, it will keep your legs elevated, maintaining a proper body position. Try not to let the buoy slip down your legs, because this will adversely affect your body position. Although it may take a little practice, you will even be able to do flip turns while using a pull buoy.

Once you become adept at pulling, you will find that you can go remarkably fast. In fact, many people can pull long distances using just their arms—faster than they can swim. This is because the buoy elevates their legs so that no energy is spent maintaining the heavy leg muscles in a proper streamlined position.

Like many swimmers, I often incorporate pulling in my workout. Sometimes I pull during my warm-up, concentrating on stroke technique and hand position and focusing on breathing bilaterally. At other times, I do a “pull set” (for example, 5 × 100 on 1:20—five 100-yard swims leaving every minute and twenty seconds) as one of the interval sets in my workout.

Hand Paddles

Using hand paddles is a form of aquatic resistance training, an excellent way to strengthen the muscles of the arms, shoulders, chest, and upper back. Usually made of a hard, plastic material, hand paddles come in a variety of shapes but are basically rectangular. On top they have two arcs of rubber tubing (see Figure 14.4). Simply slide your fingers through the first arc, place your middle finger through the second, and you are ready to go.

Because the paddles make your hand larger, you encounter greater resistance as you move them through the water. This not only works the specific muscles you need for swimming but also causes your heart to work harder. One of the key values of hand paddles is that they force you to move your hands correctly, elbows high, in the S-pattern described in Chapters 6 through 10. If you drop your elbows, you will immediately find that your paddles “slip” and you get no propulsion at all.

A constant temptation with paddles is to grip the edges with your thumb and little finger, thus guiding them through the water and preventing slipping. But this defeats one of their major purposes: to force you to stroke properly even when your muscles begin to tire—and when you first start using paddles you will tire very quickly.

Paddles are often used along with a pull buoy. This results in even greater stress on your upper-body muscles. But a word of caution: build up the distance you swim using hand paddles gradually. At the first sign of pain or soreness, stop. Don’t push it! For many people, particularly adults, the additional shoulder stress can result in injury.

Fins

You probably thought that fins were used only by snorkelers and scuba divers. Or perhaps you have seen them simply as toys for children playing in the water. But in recent years fins have become an important piece of equipment used both in training and in teaching certain techniques.

Swim fins work by increasing the surface area of your feet, letting you exert more pressure on the water. This in turn helps you move faster. There are several benefits to using fins, among them that they help you develop leg strength, allow you to practice swimming at race speed, and increase your ankle flexibility (see Figure 14.5).

Fins are also an excellent way to accelerate the healing of a sprained or strained ankle. According to a recent study in The Physician and Sports medicine by Dr. James Larson, kicking with fins helps you recover strength and range of motion. The water dampens sudden stress while the fins provide additional resistance to rebuild ankle strength.

Occasionally I incorporate kicking with fins into my warm-up or as a set in my workout. For example, my warm-up may include a 500-yard backstroke kick with fins, in which I make sure I go at least ten yards underwater using a reverse dolphin kick on every turn (eight to twelve kicks). This improves my ankle flexibility, helps me think about my turns, and increases my lung capacity. Sometimes I will try to make each one hundred yards faster than the one before, or I may do a set of freestyle, backstroke, or butterfly kicks with fins. A typical set would be five or ten 100s, leaving every 1:20.

A problem with using fins in workouts is that they tend to become addictive. They are so much fun that you may find yourself coming up with excuses for using them more and more. Resist! I limit my fin use to two or three times a week, and a maximum of 1,000 yards each time.

Swim fins are also useful in learning to swim the butterfly, back-stroke, and breaststroke correctly. In the butterfly they provide extra power and help develop the undulating motion that characterizes the stroke.

In the backstroke, they are doubly useful. As you are learning the stroke, fins will keep you from dragging your feet and assist you in maintaining the proper body position. They will also help you learn the “Berkoff blastoff,” the underwater reverse dolphin kick many backstroke swimmers now use on their starts and turns.

Many coaches have their swimmers use fins when they are learning the dolphin breaststroke or the new wave-action breaststroke (see Chapter 9). The fins are useful both in learning the rhythm of the stroke and in maintaining a high body position.

Training Fins

But plain old swim fins may be obsolescent. Since 1990 increasing numbers of swimmers at all levels have been using a new generation of training fins. The most popular are called Zoomers, a sort of superfin created for the serious swimmer. Zoomers are performance fins shorter than regular fins. They were invented by Marty Hull, a former California dentist who is now a full-time inventor and designer of exercise equipment (see Figure 14.6). He is also one of the top Masters swimmers in the world.

Zoomers provide an effective, specific weight workout in the water. The idea behind them is simple: they allow you to employ the full range of motion you use when racing, at the same or slightly higher speeds, and with significantly greater force. The result is muscles built in the precise proportions needed for a particular swimming movement.

The highly successful Stanford University men’s and women’s teams use Zoomers during 40 percent or more of their workouts. Basically the fins are used two ways: during regular interval training and for high-speed sprinting. When worn during normal sets, Zoomers provide high-level cardiovascular conditioning, but because you go faster when wearing them, the rest intervals are a little longer than usual to allow for sufficient recovery.

Kicking sprints, called shooters, are done underwater without breathing. Swimmers use either a freestyle kick or a reverse dolphin kick (underwater). A set of shooters consists of ten to twenty one-lap (twenty-five yards or fifty meters) sprints swum all-out. Between sprints swimmers either rest or swim an easy lap or two.

Swimming sprints consist of a set of 25-, 50-, or 100-yard high-speed swims with sufficient rest between each sprint to recover.

By 1993 other manufacturers, including Barracuda, Force Fin, Hyperfin, and Speedo, had introduced their own training fins to compete with Zoomers.

Other Equipment

As mentioned in Chapter 6, many swimmers wear two, three, or even more suits while working out. This time-honored practice has a dual purpose: it allows you to extend the life of worn-out, threadbare swimsuits which, if worn alone, might well expose you to obscenity statutes; and it increases resistance while you are training. When the time finally comes to squeeze into only one Lycra suit for your big race, your body will seem lighter, and you will feel as though you are slipping through the water.

From time to time you may find yourself using additional paraphernalia as you work out. Many swimmers train with a drag suit, especially during the early part of the season. Developed by Doc Counsilman, it is worn over your swimsuit and features strategically located pockets that catch the water as you swim forward, greatly increasing the resistance you encounter. The harder you swim, the greater the resistance. Swimming even a few hundred yards while wearing a drag suit can be exhausting, especially at first. But it is a great way to build conditioning.

A new piece of equipment based on the same principle is the Swim Chute, a parachute manufactured by KYTEC. Here an adjustable parachute, attached by straps to your waist, is dragged behind you. Again: the harder you swim, the greater the resistance.

Some swimmers wear small weights around their wrists or biceps while training. Again, the theory is a familiar one: overload the muscles during training to build strength.

Another way to increase resistance and build strength is to place a small inner tube around your ankles. This prevents you from using your legs at all. Some swimmers like to use a tube in conjunction with a pull buoy, paddles, and a drag suit.

Bill Mulliken, an Olympic breaststroke champion and now a successful corporate lawyer in Chicago, often wears sneakers and tights when he practices his breaststroke kick. Other swimmers use webbed gloves to improve their feel for the water. Some of the gear you will need may be supplied by the pool where you train. The rest may be purchased in sporting-goods shops, through catalogs, or directly from the manufacturer. Appendix B provides a list of places from which you can order any of the paraphernalia just discussed.

The inventory of innovative swimming techniques and equipment is almost endless. One technique, which uses half-inch surgical tubing, is called “tethered swimming.” After making loops at each end of the tubing, wrap the middle of it around a stationary object at the end of the pool. A ladder or starting block will do just fine. Next, slip the loops around your waist. Then start swimming. As you swim away from the edge, the tubing begins to stretch. When it is stretched as far as it will go, you must swim powerfully to prevent being pulled back.

A high-tech version utilizing the same principle involves the use of a flume. This is the aquatic equivalent of a treadmill. A swimmer swims against an adjustable current of water, trying to maintain position. A flume allows a swimmer to get a good workout even in a very small pool, and it helps a coach who wants to critique a swimmer’s stroke technique.

One of the world’s most sophisticated flumes, used to analyze the strokes of America’s elite swimmers, is located at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. But many small pools around the country now feature flumes. Even small home pools can use them. In 1993 manufacturers introduced several low-priced flumes for use in backyard pools.