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Official website of Adirondack LMSC of U.S. Masters Swimming

Training

Stronger hips and better balance with single-leg exercises

Improving balance and strength in a single-leg stance is vital for general health and fitness—both balance and strength play a big role in avoiding accidental falls as you age. Progress can be slow when learning to master these movements, so patience and repeated practice is needed.

New Year—New Opportunities!

Every January, swim teams and gyms see crowds of enthusiastic resolution setters flocking in to jumpstart their fitness programs for the new year. But we all know what happens next, right? By February, most of those folks have faded back into the woodwork, never to be seen again. Face it, we all tend to begin the year with enthusiasm, and then find it easy to get derailed.

Don’t Do Swimming-Specific Exercises

Swimming is different from other sports in many ways. Therefore, it might seem to make sense to create a dryland training program centered on a swimming-specific program, even specializing in a certain stroke or race distance. However, this approach can lead to the craziest looking exercises, with swimmers desperately trying to mimic the exact movements of a particular swimming stroke. This can lead to frustration or, worse, injury.

Building to Your Goals

After winning four gold medals and setting four world records in the 1976 Olympics, champion backstroker John Naber revealed that before that season started, he had calculated the time he was reasonably sure could win each race (knowing that it would be faster than anyone had gone before). Then he subtracted that time from his current best, ending up with the number of seconds he’d need to improve to hit that target time. Then he divided that time increment by the number of swim practices remaining before the competition.

The Happy Circle

Unless you own a private pool, you’ll often need to share a lane with other swimmers. Here are some guidelines for making that process as enjoyable and productive as possible for everyone.

Train Your Swimmers to be Average

I was recently talking to a Masters swimmer who had some questions about his dryland and strength training program. He wanted to know how to get stroke-specific with his program and hopefully improve more in the water.

Thriving Through Winter

It seems that as days get shorter and colder, our bodies want to slow down, store up fat, and take a long winter’s nap. Holidays offer temptations to consume copious calories—and year-end visits from snowstorms, relatives, and Santa Claus can disrupt our exercise routines. With these factors working against us, how do we maintain swimming momentum throughout the season?

Anti-Slouching Exercises

The postural muscles of the mid- and upper-back provide a foundation from which to produce power while swimming. Strengthening these muscles with the following exercises might improve your speed in the water. These exercises may not be very fancy or exciting, but they’re essential for you as a swimmer—they’ll offer you a fighting chance of keeping good posture throughout a lifetime in this sport.

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