Weight Training For Swimming?

An excerpt from my blog post on ‘Weight Training For Swimming?’

I would tend to be cautious about weight-training that does not mimic the range of motion and conditions those muscles and joints will be functioning in while swimming. Strength that actually converts into swimming speed and endurance is not directly about getting more muscles to fire – it is about getting the right muscle groups to fire together, in the right sequence and right timing, with just the right amount of force. Swimming strength has to develop in union with movement precision. All movement is training the brain, yes, but what the author of that article did not point out is that the brain is memorizing and strengthening the specific motor control circuits for a ‘push-up’ or a ‘pull-up’ or ‘bicep curl’ not the motor-control circuits needed for the unique assembly and choreography of the swimming stroke (or a particular part of the stroke cycle). Swimming effort is done against an unusual medium (water) that is explicitly unlike any materials used and forces resisted in dry-land weight training (gravity, elastic bands, friction resistance, solid surfaces, etc). Building muscle cells can be generic to a degree, but training better neuro-motor control must be extremely specific.

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