Swimming Exercises: Shoulder Stability, Bodyweight Dryland, and Ankles and Swimmers
Swimming Tips by Dan Daly
DALY Tip 1: Shoulder Stability Exercises
Keep your shoulders healthier by balancing opposing joint actions and muscles with your cross training. Improve your range of motion and performance, while reducing your likelihood of injury with these shoulders stability and exercises that improve position overhead.
Suggestion for all exercises below : 3-4 sets of 8-12 repetitions
Post 2: Bodyweight Dryland Exercises
Here’s two bodyweight dryland exercises you can do anywhere to improve mobility and stability in your hips and shoulders. Pair them together in a superset of 3x5 each side.
Post 3: Improve your kick
Want to improve your kick? Check your ankles first!
Swimmers, you should have 50-70 degrees of plantar flexion (toe pointing) range of motion at your ankle. Less than these norms and your feet may be dragging in the water putting the breaks on your propulsion.
Test your ankles on land with this plantar flexion assessment. Beginning in a seated position, toes pointing towards the ceiling or 12o’clock, press your toes as far forward as possible. You should be able to point them past 1o’clock and closer to 2o’clock or more. Note symmetry left to right.
Shy on one side or both? Here are a few soft tissue and dynamic mobility drills to improve it, then retest.
DALY Tip 4: Dryland work
Here’s a summary from an earlier post on some of my favorite dryland condition sets pairing timed double arm pulling intervals with explosive upper or lower body exercises. What combination would you choose?
