My PT has recommended adding swimming to my weekly exercise routine to help heal and strengthen a hip/lower back injury.
Do you foresee any negative impact on the Best WO Plan by adding some lap swimming a few times a week? And/or do you have any advice on trying to incorporate the two?
Thanks in advance for your time!
Hi Christian,
Do you have any recommendations for incorporating weight training and swimming?
Thanks in advance!
I’m not gonna lie, swimming is one sport that I never trained people in and I have not experience programming including swimming sessions, so my advice would be, at best, guess work.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. Greatly appreciated!
If your focus is solely on swimming you should keep lifting to 2x a week. I ran triathlons a couple years ago and did a LOT of swimming.
If your only goal is “add steady lap swimming a few days a week”, then go right ahead. Just be mindful than until you’re conditioned for it, lifting right after swimming is not an option, so either do it early in the morning and lift in the afternoon/evening, or lift in the morning and swim in the evening (evening swimming was never my cup of tea), or just give the swim it’s own day.
Take some time to watch some YT videos on proper swim form. A proper efficient freestyle is one of the most difficult things you can do. Now, an inefficient freestyle is GREAT for conditioning because if you can muscle your way through a 1-2km swim your lungs are bulletproof, but if a PT is recommending you swim it’s meant to be more fluid, so you’ll really need to get your breathing down, and your catch/pull. Swimming with bad form can wreck your shoulders. Practice your breathing as well. Only one eye comes out of the water for breath, and you CAN breathe with some water in the pocket of your cheek.
Also, get a swim cap, good goggles and some swimming earplugs - Walmart, Target, lots of places have them, they’re little silicone balls that you can squish into your ears and pull your swim cap down on. You might feel silly but it’s SO comfortable once you get used to wearing all of them - no swimmers ear, no chlorine burn.
Rappinit
Thank you very much for taking the time to write up a detailed response. Greatly appreciated!
I swam on the swim team all thru school but gave it up upon graduation. That was many years ago. I’m sure I will need some work on form and such…or maybe just wing it.
I ran across an article basically saying that lifting and swimming complement each other nicely, but as you stated, one or the other could suffer if done to closely together.
My main focus is lifting but when the PT recommended swimming for injury recovery I figured I would give it a try. Just looking for some nice easy swimming to aid in recovery and enjoy a little different training than I am used to.
Anyway, thanks again for all your advice and recommendations!
MH
Not a problem, dude. Sorry for the assumption that you had no swimming history, haha - most people I know don’t.
No problem at all. Kinda funny…the PT said the exact same thing. “I usually don’t recommend swimming cuz most people nowadays don’t know how to swim”
Thought that was kinda trippy…
Thanks again for all the help!