Should Masters Swimmers Really Be Lifting Lighter as They Get Older?
There is a fairly understandable progression I see with Masters athletes as they get older. Training starts to hurt a little more, recovery isn't quite what it used to be, and there might be an old shoulder that needs managing, a knee that doesn't particularly like squatting anymore, or a back that reminds you about yesterday's session when you get out of bed the next morning. So the gym gradually gets toned down. Weights get lighter, reps get higher and anything that looks particularly explosive can disappear altogether.
For a swimmer, that can seem perfectly logical. Swimming itself is already demanding and, depending on how often you train, you're performing thousands of repeated contractions every week. Why add heavy weights and explosive movements on top of that, particularly when you're 50, 60 or 70 rather than 20?
The problem is that we might be solving the wrong problem.
Before deciding whether Masters swimmers should lift lighter or heavier, we probably need to be clear about what we're actually trying to achieve in the gym. Strength and conditioning isn't there simply to make a swimmer tired away from the pool, nor do I think its job is to reproduce swimming movements with weights attached. We already have somewhere very good for practising swimming. It's called the pool.
For me, much of the value of S&C is in developing or maintaining physical qualities that support swimming performance but aren't necessarily developed particularly well by swimming itself. That includes the ability to produce high levels of force, to produce that force quickly, to maintain useful muscle and to build enough physical capacity to tolerate the training and competition we're asking the swimmer to do.
That becomes particularly relevant as we get older because strength and, importantly, power become harder to retain. Power is our ability to produce force quickly, and that distinction matters. You can remain reasonably strong while becoming noticeably less explosive. Anyone who has coached Masters athletes for long enough has probably seen some version of this. They can still produce force, but producing a lot of it quickly becomes more difficult.
Now think about where that matters in swimming. A race involves a huge amount of repeated muscular work, particularly as the distance increases, but some pretty important moments are very different. Leaving the blocks is one. Pushing away from the wall is another. You have a very limited amount of time to produce force in both situations. Being strong helps, but you also need to be able to access that strength quickly.
Once we look at it this way, the question of light, heavy or fast weights becomes much more useful. The answer is that we probably need all three at different times and for different reasons.
Relatively heavy resistance has a purpose because it exposes the swimmer to levels of force they are unlikely to encounter during normal swimming. We aren't lifting heavily because heavy is somehow automatically better. We're doing it because if we want to maintain the capacity to produce high levels of force, at some point we need to ask the athlete to produce high levels of force. Swimming four or five times a week doesn't necessarily provide that stimulus, no matter how fit the swimmer is.
But simply becoming stronger isn't the whole answer either. If we want to maintain the ability to express force quickly, we also need opportunities to move quickly. Depending on the athlete, that might mean jumps, medicine-ball work, appropriate Olympic-lift derivatives or resistance exercises performed with genuine intent to move the load quickly.
What that explosive work looks like will depend enormously on the swimmer. For one it might be a jump variation; for another it could be a relatively simple medicine-ball throw or a resistance exercise performed quickly through the concentric phase. It doesn't need to look impressive and it certainly doesn't need to leave them exhausted. A small number of high-quality explosive efforts with adequate recovery may be all we need.
I think we sometimes confuse training safely as we get older with training slowly. They're not the same thing. We can make explosive training appropriate by selecting the right movement, controlling the volume and matching it to the athlete's training history. In the same way, we can make supposedly safe light resistance training completely inappropriate by doing far too much of it.
Lighter weights certainly aren't useless either. There are plenty of situations where I'll use them. Some exercises simply don't require heavy resistance. Lighter loading can be appropriate when introducing a movement, working around an injury or developing particular supporting musculature. What I wouldn't do is assume that because a swimmer is older, lighter automatically becomes the default for everything.
There's another problem with that assumption. Light weights aren't necessarily easier to recover from. Compare five controlled repetitions with a reasonably heavy resistance against 15 or 20 repetitions with a lighter load taken close to failure. The second option can create plenty of fatigue simply because the number on the weight stack is smaller. For a swimmer already accumulating a large amount of repetitive muscular work in the pool, adding more high-repetition work in the gym may simply give them more of something they're already getting plenty of.
As Masters athletes get older, I'm often more interested in managing the dose of strength and power training than automatically reducing its quality. If recovery becomes an issue, perhaps we need fewer exercises, fewer working sets or better placement of the gym sessions around important swimming sessions. Maybe we need to change an exercise because a shoulder or knee doesn't tolerate it particularly well. There are plenty of things we can change before deciding that everything needs to become lighter and slower.
A Masters swimmer might have a full-time job, children or grandchildren, poor sleep, an old injury and four swimming sessions already sitting in the week. We can't pretend those things don't matter. The theoretically perfect S&C program isn't much use if it leaves them too tired to swim properly.
So perhaps the better question isn't how heavy a Masters swimmer should lift. It's what is the smallest amount of quality strength and power work we can use to maintain or develop the qualities we're after without unnecessarily interfering with their swimming?
Sometimes the answer will involve relatively heavy weights. Sometimes lighter resistance is exactly what we need. And sometimes the most important part of an exercise isn't how much weight is being moved, but how quickly we're trying to move it.
The goal isn't to prove how much a Masters swimmer can lift or how high they can jump. It's to make sure the gym continues doing the job we put it there to do. We need enough high-force work to challenge strength and enough genuine speed in the program to work on explosiveness. We just don't need so much of either that we're compromising the swimming.
As swimmers get older, it's understandable that training becomes a little more cautious. But if that caution gradually removes meaningful strength work and anything explosive, we may be taking away exactly the qualities that are becoming harder to retain.
So should Masters swimmers lift lighter as they get older? Sometimes. But because they're older isn't a particularly good reason.
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