Swimmers are Overtrained

I will try to keep my ranting to a minimum; however this is something that I feel people should know.

Swimming is a technical sport.  Because of the nature of the sport, athletes must become very accustomed to the mechanics of the movements so that they truly become "fluid".  I find that the value of a base level of swimming practice comes in handy because without the practice of technique, we are just too inefficient to compete.  I feel however that coaches in swimming have taken this too far. 

There is no reason that swim sets and practices should be as long as they are.  I remember some days in high school where I swam triple days: three practices; two of which were in succession.  Not only was this overwhelming from a mental standpoint, I was chronically fatigued and could not recover.  As a larger swimmer, I felt as though my body needed more time to recover.

After swimmers have established perfect technique (which should be developed through low volume, high quality sets, such as swimming with underwater cameras), the focus should be on race preparation.  Too often, I feel that coaches make athletes do sets because they need to fill an allotted time and by beating the swimmers up, they practice fundamentals better.  I can promise you that my performance and technique disintegrated when performing long sets.  Since understanding swim sets is difficult to visualize from a outside observer perspective, I will show that the important variable is time.

Swim races range from 50 yards to 1650 yards.  Most all races consist of 50-100 yards, especially of one stroke.  For the men, 50-100 yards should not take more than one minute (any style).  Females are often close behind these numbers.  In a track analogy, this would be similar to running 200-400 meters.  A longer swim might be a 200 yard swim, which on a track compares to an 800.  Almost all the races take either ~30 seconds, ~ 1 minute, ~ 2 minutes.  In developing a protocol for runners how much would you assign them to run?  Would you make them do repeats?  Lets say you made them do 400 repeats for aerobic endurance.  And what is the most you might give them?  I would say that most track coaches would not go higher than 10x400 repeats, and that is being kind to the high volume coaches.  This would compare to 10x100yards, which for most swimmers occurs during the warm-up.  Many swim programs can range between 3,000-10,000 yards in a single practice.  Would you make a 400m dash sprinter run 40,000 yards (22.7 miles) in a practice?  I wouldn't.

The next thing to consider is the muscles involved.  While track and field runners utilize the strongest and largest muscles in the body (the legs); swimming is dominated by the upper body.  Kicking does not count as an effective means of propulsion because it often accounts for <30 percent of the propulsion.  Therefore, the smaller muscles of the upper body are forced to handle the workload.  Considering the size to workload ratio, swim practices are not designed for swimmers success.

In this article, I am proposing that we consider some alternative methods to approaching swimming.  Adding pull-ups is probably the most successful form of dry-land practice that swimmers can take part in because the angles mimic the butterfly and breaststroke pulls.

As for coaches; stop overtraining your athletes.  Make technique a priority and ensure that your swimmers work on quality rather than quantity.  The yardage does not make you swim faster.  The technique and race specific training will.