want more athletic swimmers?

Currently, swimming coaches are wanting swimmers with more ‘athleticism’. Athleticism referring to strength, flexibility, coordination and an overall adaptability to training load. There is a recognition that it improves performance and increases coachability (yes a person with athleticism just seems to pick things up easier and quicker making our job as coaches easier). 

Why are swimmers coming through with less athleticism and how is there a gap between athletic potential and athletic development? Early specialisation! Similar to gymnastics a high volume of training hours are required at a young age which discourages junior swimmers from participating in a variety of sports. This is why most gymnasts can’t throw or catch a ball because they don’t have time for that.  (and please don’t ask me to!)

However, they are exposed to a wide variety of movement patterns within a training session that have them coming out supremely strong, flexible and coordinated. So yes they do well when they turn up to school swimming, athletics and any other sport that doesn’t involve a ball.

In swimming there are a total of 4 different strokes, 3 types of turns, 2 ways to start and 1 underwater, a total of 10 movement patterns. To create coordination the body needs to be exposed to a wide variety of movement patterns in order to develop more neural pathways between the brain and the body. In a gymnastics session there are 50 different exercises within the warm up alone, that is why gymnasts have body awareness.  Gymnastics is like your English in the core curriculum of sport. It builds your vocabulary so the body and brain can communicate with each other. For a solid conversation to happen more than 10 words are going to be needed. That is why we need swimmers doing dryland! It increases their physical literacy which will enhance coordination and body awareness. So expose them to a wide variety of movement patterns and make sure to select age appropriate exercises.

But how do we develop their strength? Well, the initial gains in force production come from better communication from brain to body. This coupled with an emphasise on correct dryland technique will increase the efficiency of the body to generate force. After all, isn’t swimming about how efficient you move through water? Prioritise the technique in which your dryland is done to maximise the strength gains along with the application in the pool.

We haven’t forgotten flexibility. That comes from all the fun shapes we put the body in. A bear crawl here to open the hamstrings up, a crab walk there to stretch the pecs and a bridge to turn things upside down and make sure the back can bend for your backstroke start.

swimnastics is for the evolution of dryland training within the sport of swimming and the evolution of athlete development sport wide. It is not about saying this is the only way to do dryland training. There are many. But it does want to increase the awareness around athlete development and give a method to coaches and athletes for improving overall athletic make up. If you have a method then great, maybe you can find things in swimnastics you wish to add. If you don’t have a method, you are welcome to use our programs as a starting point in order to make sure you are providing your athletes with a way of becoming the most athletic swimmer they can be.