Swim Alternative
Many public swimming pools I suggest may close in Townsville to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 it, but you still need or want to train, what can you do?
You don’t want to lose your cardiovascular fitness and swimming muscle strength built up so we have been using an alternative for a while now and it’s proving very effective. That is the use of a rowing ergo machine. If you have access to one - it can provide some great results - here’s why.
If we look at the muscles used for freestyle/front crawl they can be split in to upper and lower body. In the upper body, when swimming front crawl, you’ll use the deltoids (upper shoulder), latissimus dorsi (down the side of your back), trapezius (upper back and neck), triceps and biceps muscles in your arms. The muscles of the shoulders and around the shoulder blade (including the deltoids) will help ‘hold’ the ‘paddle’ (your hand and arm) in place as your body moves past it. Your core muscles, including your abdominals, trapezius and latissimus dorsi, help you hold a streamlined torso.
In the lower body, front crawl works the hip flexors, quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves. Your abdominal muscles will also engage from stabilising you in the water.
Swimming is also a great cardiovascular workout and burns about 257 kcals in half an hour. As we know swimming is also a great low impact total body workout.
In the gym (and I know these may close too) the closest we can get with respect to muscles used, calories burned, being low impact and similar cardiovascular stress is the rowing machine.
So what muscles does a rowing machine work? Being that it is an almost perfect piece of workout equipment the rowing machine muscles targeted are very similar to that of the swim: Quads, Hamstrings, Glutes, Lats, Core, Shoulders, Triceps, Back and Biceps. In rowing we also use very similar terms for the phases of the stroke they are the Catch, Drive, Finish and Recovery, so lots of commonalty.
Whilst the muscles in each phase of a rowing stroke are not identical to the swim there is a significant read across between the overall muscles used throughout the four phases of both, Catch, Drive, Finish and Recovery
Rowing is very similar from a muscles worked perspective but the good news doesn’t end there. During rowing we have a similar cardiovascular response and the calories burned are almost exactly the same at 255 kcals in 30 minutes.
Now we know we can substitute some rowing for swimming workouts when needed, what sort of workouts can we do? As with swimming we can do Endurance, Sprints, Fartlek, Intervals and Threshold sessions. Obviously, we cannot develop swim technique per say but for short periods of time we can develop or keep our muscular and cardiovascular fitness ready for when we get back on the water. For an endurance session I tend to go with time. For example, if your 400-swim time is 7 minutes and you want to cover the equivalent of a 3000km swim then this would be around 52 min 30 secs of rowing in HR zone 2-3. Note that you will cover a lot more km on the rower, so you may cover around 10km in an hour.
Below is an example of a rowing workout you can try:
Threshold
· Warm up for around 20 minutes with some solid rowing at a resistance level 2-3.
· 10 minutes into your warmup do a 1-minute pipe opener rating 30 – 32 rowing hard.
· Next (after a short break) do 3 x 15 strokes at rate 32, 34 and 36 respectively.
· Take around 1-minute easy rowing between each 15-stroke push.
· Finally do some easy rowing for 2 – 3 minutes and get ready for the actual rowing session.
Set 1 – resistance level 5-7
· Row hard at 32 strokes per minute for 30 seconds, then drop the rate down to 30 for the next 30 seconds.
· Repeat this wave for a total of 5 minutes.
· In other words, you will do each rate (30 and 32) 5 times in a row at 30 seconds each continuously for 5 minutes.
· Take 5 minutes easy rowing and repeat the 30 second rowing wave for 5 minutes.
· After that take 5 minutes easy rowing again and repeat the wave a third time.
· Row easily for 5 minutes and take a short break.
· 7 minutes after finishing the 3rd rowing wave begin the next phase.
Set 2 – resistance level 5-7
· 12 minutes steady rowing rate 28.
· Focus on power and rhythm developed in the 5-minute wave phase.
· Take a 5-minute rest and repeat the 12-minute workout.
Warm down in the usual way with easy rowing taking your heart rate and resistance level down to 2.
Static stretch out well after each workout using static stretches and foam rolling.
