Why Do I Need the Gym If I Swim Five Days a Week?
If you already swim five days a week, it is fair to ask what the gym is actually going to add. You are already training hard, working on technique, fitness, starts, turns and race pace, and probably doing more total training than most people around you. So why add strength training?
Because the gym can develop physical qualities that are difficult to develop properly in the pool. The most obvious one is strength. Swimming gives you resistance, but it does not give you the same opportunity to progressively increase the amount of force you can produce that you get in the gym. That may mean using genuinely heavy resistance at times. Squats, deadlift variations, presses, pulls and other strength exercises can be progressively loaded so the swimmer is exposed to forces well beyond those encountered during normal swimming. The aim is not to lift heavy simply for the sake of it, but there are times when heavier loading is exactly what is needed to increase strength.
That matters because every stroke, start and turn depends on force production. The stronger you are, the more force you have available. That does not mean trying to use maximum force on every stroke. It means the force required to swim at a particular speed can represent a smaller percentage of what you are physically capable of producing. In simple terms, you have more in reserve.
Strength is only part of it. Swimming performance also depends on how quickly you can produce force, particularly when there is very little time to do it. Starts and turns are the obvious examples. The gym gives us several ways of training that quality, and the appropriate method will depend on the swimmer. Jumps and medicine ball throws may be useful, but so can loaded jumps, Olympic lifting variations such as pulls or cleans, and other exercises where the intention is to move forcefully and quickly. The point is not that every swimmer needs to Olympic lift. It is that the gym allows us to train across a range of loads and velocities in a way that normal pool training cannot.
For Masters swimmers, that becomes particularly important because strength and power become harder to maintain as we get older if they are not trained. Continuing to swim regularly is obviously valuable, but swimming five times a week does not automatically provide the stimulus required to maintain or improve every physical quality that contributes to performance.
Where gym training can go wrong is when we start trying to turn it into swimming on land. A cable pull that looks a bit like freestyle is not really reproducing freestyle. On land you do not have buoyancy supporting the body, you do not have water creating drag around the arm and hand, and the resistance from a cable or band changes differently through the movement. Your body is also stabilising itself against gravity rather than moving through water. The exercise might look similar, but the movement problem is different.
That is why the pool is already the best place to practise the swimming pattern. It gives you the exact environment in which the stroke has to work: the water, the body position, the timing, the rhythm and the interaction between all of those things. We do not need the gym to provide an inferior version of that. We can use it for something the pool cannot provide as effectively.
That might mean improving leg strength so there is more force available off the blocks and walls. It might mean building upper-body pulling strength so there is greater capacity to produce force through the stroke. It might mean improving trunk strength so force can be transferred effectively through the body. None of those exercises has to look particularly like swimming. The important question is whether they are developing a physical quality that is useful to the swimmer.
There is also the less glamorous, but equally important, job of making the swimmer more physically robust. Swimming five times a week means repeating the same movements thousands of times, particularly through the shoulders and upper body. Strength training gives us an opportunity to build capacity in the shoulders, upper back, trunk and other areas that have to tolerate that workload. It cannot guarantee that an injury will not occur, but getting stronger and better able to tolerate the demands of training can help reduce some of the physical vulnerabilities that contribute to swimming-related problems.
Then you take that greater strength, power and physical capacity back into the pool, where the swimming itself determines how it is expressed. The gym does not replace swimming and it does not teach you how to swim. You still have to learn how to apply whatever strength and power you have within the stroke.
If you are already swimming five times per week, simply doing more training is not necessarily the answer. The question is whether your current training is developing all the physical qualities you need to perform. Another swim session might improve your fitness, your feel for the water, your technique or your ability to hold pace. It is much less likely to substantially increase your maximum strength or your ability to produce high levels of force quickly. Those are different adaptations, and the gym gives us a much better environment in which to train them.
That does not mean spending four nights a week lifting weights. For many Masters swimmers, two well-designed strength sessions can provide plenty of stimulus without interfering with the work being done in the pool.
The aim is not to make gym training look like swimming. It is to use the pool to practise swimming, and use the gym to build physical qualities that give you more to work with when you get back in the water.
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