Period 4
Strength Training for swimming
So after setting everything up with doing the little flexibility tests that Salo talked about and keeping up with my swim diary with my swim diary with the small amount of meets I had, I went back to the book once again to see what all Dave Salo had in store for me to continue on my journey to better my swimming ability.
The next thing to start doing was to start working on strength training. This is because by strengthening and training the body it is able to perform better during practice and races. The type of strength to work on is what Salo calls 'Foundational Strength' which is getting the body as a whole to a level of strength for swimmers. Its goal isn't to get as strong as possible but to form as base that you will be able to improve through swimming specific training (Salo 38).
The parts of the body that you need to work out are the upper body and lower body with exercise that also help improve the core. These exercises range from things like squats and lunges to chest presses and pull-ups. Salo says,"you want to take four to eight weeks a the beginning of the season, training two or three times per week, to build foundational strength" (Salo 39). This means that these exercises aren't designed to show immediate results they mean to get your body to a certain state that you can work from latter in the swimming season. Now obviously this isn't the start of the season but non the less starting it now is a good idea since I don't have any big swim meets soon so it won't affect my swim meet performance in any negative ways.
After one of my workouts I had my sister take a couple example photos of two of the work-out activities I did. (Left- Lunge Right-Calf raises)
The end goal of this is that once I've been doing these workouts for a few weeks my body will be ready for stroke specific exercises that require more strength and effort to do and make my strokes more effective.
No comments:
Post a Comment