Swimming Exercises: Reasons why endurance athletes should do strength training
Swimming Tips by Dan Daly
Many endurance athletes avoid strength training because:
They don’t have time
They don’t want to be sore
They don’t want to bulk up
They don’t want to slow down
Running or biking is enough lower body “strength”
DALY Tip 1: They truth is:
Strength training can improve time efficiency with small doses that maximize adaptation and improve the quality of other training volume.
Soreness is temporary, indicates a lack of tolerance in your ability to produce force or repetitive force, and can be minimized by focusing on low rep, higher load strength work. Strength training also increases resilience and susceptibility to injury, aches, and pains.
Low rep, high load strength training improves your ability to produce force, not grow. Endurance training volumes and energy intakes are often contradictory to gaining significant mass.
Planning long term, and periodizing training focuses, allows your body to adapt to higher training volumes inline with key races. You may be tired and broken down in the short-term so that you can feel stronger and more explosive when it counts.
If you want to get faster, or improve your ability to sustain pace for longer periods, you need to increase your maximum force production. Running, biking, and even swimming do not provide the overload of force to make any appreciable strength gains.
What’s holding you back from training and racing your best?
