TRC-Strength Training for Swimmers

2 Strength Training Exercises that Swimmers should avoid
Strength training in the sport of swimming is paradoxical. It is a must for swimmers to reach their full potential, but strength training doesn’t always result in the desired outcome for swimmers. Sometimes a swimmer gets bigger, stronger and slower.
In most land-based sports, if an athlete gets bigger and stronger, he or she gets better. With more strength, one can jump higher, run faster, throw harder and hit harder. Yet in water-based sports one can get bigger and much stronger, but swim slower. The reason for this is the unique relationship a swimmer has in water between their physical shape and the drag forces that slow them down.
In teaching swimming technique at The Race Club for 14 years, I have come to appreciate the extreme sensitivity of altering the shape of the swimmer’s body and the resultant change in frontal drag forces. What may seem like relatively small changes in a swimmer’s size or shape or technique, particularly with certain parts of the body, can have a profound impact on the frontal drag forces that they cause.
When considering what is the most desirable shape of a fast swimmer, the forces of both propulsion and frontal drag come into play. Building the strength to increase propulsion while keeping the swimmer’s drag coefficient low to minimize frontal drag are both desirable. When it comes to frontal drag, there are two muscle groups that stand out as potentially being in harm’s way. Because of the pulling motion, this is especially true in freestyle, backstroke and fly. One is the Biceps muscle and the other is the Pectoralis Major muscle. For two reasons, we rarely see these two muscles become highly developed in elite swimmers. First, these muscles are not as important in the biomechanics of the high-elbow pulling motion when compared to other muscles of the shoulder and upper back. Second, if overly developed and large, those two muscles will add a considerable amount of frontal drag force to slow the swimmer. 
With the pulling motion of the arm, it is the upper arm, not the lower arm nor the hand, that causes most of the frontal drag force. In order to cause drag, an object must be moving forward. The bigger the object and the faster it moves, the more drag it causes. The upper arm is wider and is moving forward longer and faster than the rest of the arm during the pulling motion. A big Biceps muscle just gets more in the way as the arm moves through the water trying to generate propulsion.
The same is true of the Pectoralis Major muscle. A large Pectoralis Major muscle simply adds more girth to a swimmer’s body moving forward, resulting in more frontal drag. Back in the 1960s, a world record holder in the 100-meter freestyle, Don Havens, was born without a Pectoralis Major muscle on one side of his chest. One of the greatest freestylers of all time, Peter Van den Hoogenband from Holland, was born with a chest deformity called Pectus Excavatum, a sunken chest. Both deformities likely helped those swimmers by reducing frontal drag. 
Two well-known exercises that help develop those two muscles are biceps curls and bench presses. If you want to swim fast, avoid them. People that bench press or curl a lot of weight usually don’t swim fast. That is the strength paradox of swimming. Speed in swimming depends on the ability to generate much propulsion from both the pull and the kick while minimizing the frontal drag forces. Big Biceps and Pectoralis Major muscles add more to frontal drag than they contribute to propulsion.
At The Race Club, we believe in building swim-specific strength without disproportionately adding to the frontal drag forces. When designing your strength program for swimmers, keep that in mind.
What other strength training exercises should swimmers avoid doing? Want to know which exercises? Check out our entire Strength training series with Alabama Men’s Head Swimming Coach, Coley Stickels, on our Lane 3 Race Club subscription. 
Yours in swimming,
Gary Sr.