Sports conditioning

[Neil G]

Hi Mark,

I used to be a competitive swimmer (an average competitive swimmer, but a competitive swimmer none the less). I did this between the ages of 10 and 18 - I?m 25 now - and the training consisted of very long hours in the pool, a bit of running and a bit of bodyweight exercise circuit training.

It didn?t seem to matter what distance I was training for, the training seemed to be based on swimming as far as I could in one session. I remember the coach stating that anything less than a two hour session was no good.

Since then, having read about other views regarding training, I?m curious as to your thoughts on the following ideas.

Would someone training for a skill-dependent sport such as swimming be better served spending less time in the pool and more time in the weights room? For example, a swimming trainee could use a Crossfit approach to increase metabolic and cardiovascular conditioning whilst increasing strength on programmes such as those described in your books. Of course, skills training would be required, but this could be done in a more limited period each week in the pool along with some kind of sport-specific conditioning.

Looking back, most of the events I used to compete in lasted from between 30 seconds and about 2 and a half minutes. It now seems silly that I had to spend long hours in the pool training for this knowing what I know now about the specificity of adaptation to stress.

And this model could of course be applied to other sports: running, cycling, etc.

Your thoughts?

Thanks in advance,

Neil

[Mark Rippetoe]

It's interesting that you regard swimming as a skill-dependent sport. It seems more like a repetitive motion-dependent sport to me, one that is learned quite quickly by any decent athlete capable of performing the motions efficiently. I don't coach swimmers, and have never done competitive swimming myself, but a few things are obvious:

1. Any repetitive motion, once learned, requires minimal skill maintenance. This is true for sports otherwise regarded as technical, like Olympic weightlifting.

2. Fencing is a skill-dependent sport. Gymnastics, diving, downhill skiing, and boxing are too. Swimming and running are not so much.

3. Once the movement patterns are learned to the level of efficiency that the athlete is capable of demonstrating, other factors become more important to high-level performance.

4. These include anthropometry, strength, body composition, neuromuscular efficiency, and endurance capacity. Some of these characteristics are more trainable than others, and some are not trainable at all.

5. Lots of coaches in lots of sports get married to training methods that have been used for many years and that just don't work well. Good athletes excel in spite of them, not because of them.

[JLascek]

The training that he describes from his competition days also ignores the principle of specificity regarding energy system usage.

I've read a study in an ex phys book that split swimmers in two groups. One group swam 10,000 yards a day while the other swam half that amount, or 5,000 yards. The percentage of performance improvement was the same among both groups. Group A was doing twice the work for absolutely no more gain than group B. This can lead to overtraining, which means the athlete has a lousy existence (I've seen it happen first hand with friends). Compound that with a lack of appropriate strength training and conditioning, and you have an athlete who's structures, specifically the shoulder, are ill-prepared to withstand such training (among other things).