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Really??? I lifted seriously for my last 2 yrs in college, then got back into swimming more. I gained about 15 lbs or so during my 2 yrs of "serious" lifting, and of course looked more muscular. However, when i stopped lifting and went back to just swimming, and allowed myself to gain another 10 lbs, i looked even more muscular after that. So, to each his own but my experience is that just swimming will put muscle on a person, IF they eat enough to actually gain that muscle. Obv you have to eat enough though:)
I don't think I was swimming enough to gain that kinda muscle. This was this past winter/early spring, and I was still learning to swim, open turns and the like and only swimming 6-8k/week.
I think I could probably get away with cutting out the weights now that I'm at 20-25k/week. I would still probably do the abs stuff and some pullups though, just because I love pullups and I'm good at them.
I'm headed to college for engineering this fall (UVA), so it's likely that I won't have any time to lift anymore. At that point, I'll probably just s/b/r and do some core/pullups like above.
I do find that it's easy to fit in small amounts of strength stuff with no time cost. For example: I usually do 100 pushups as soon as I wake up (about 2.5 minutes). When I get out of the pool after a swim, I walk by the pullup bars on the way to the locker room (they're right there on deck). I always do 10 pullups after a swim.
Over the course of the week, that's 700 pushups, and 40-60pullups, on top of my dedicated strength training.
Like you said, to each his own - and I'm willing to admit that strength training is the first workout to get cut if I'm tired or busy. And like I said, soon it probably won't even be a possibility. Can't say I'm sad about it :D
"Don't you have to go be stupid somewhere else?"..."Not until 4!"