Personally, I have found ZERO correlation between my gym strength and swim times. I’ve had my best swims when I am not even close to my best pull-ups and bench press, and vice versa.
1 Like
She is strong, but she cannot do a pull up without assistance. It’s one of the things she has chosen to work on this year. Pushups are hard too but her team added swimstrong dry land program and it’s all coming together. What she can do is hold plank until she gets bored with it. She has great core and leg strength. She is also has flexibility and range of motion in her arms that amazes other swimmers and swim coaches. As a result she can do an amazing streamline.
People in this thread aren’t defining strength properly.
Strength really is better viewed as max force for low-rep activities. Like a max benchpress, or squats for <10 reps. Nothing we do in triathlon does this few reps. Even swimming a 50 will require double that number of reps. So pure strength, say, like a giant powerlifter has, isn’t useful for getting faster at tri distances.
POWER, on the other hand, is what we’re really aiming for. Roughly, it’s force over time (you physics guys can nerd out on the equations if you want). The truly fast 12 year olds compensate for their lack of pure strength by just turning over their arms like crazy. Farrrrr faster than the typical adult AGer, even a good one. Contrary to what the swim coaches keep preaching about perfect technique, long lopy smooth strokes, look at them crank it out - the technique is solid no doubt, but pales in comparison to their eggbeater turnover, especially given how short their arms are the younger they are.
This whole discussion is analogous to asking why a giant powerlifter who can squat 1000+ pounds, can’t win running races of a mile and up on their massive leg strength alone, even against talented 12 year old boys/girl runners. In fact, even if you move them to cycling, their powerlifting edge falls flat for sure at triathlon distances, they have zero chance against a FOP AGer on the bike in these distances.
2 Likes
Also another key reason why 12 year old girls with technique in the pool can defeat say a 20 year old man without technique in the pool whereas the same 20 year old man smokes the 12 year old girl is because of a key thing people forget.
In swimming we are not fighting our full body weight against gravity. The force needed to move the body is not against full body weight like on land but some subset of our body weight (I don’t know how much). But if you go on a vasa erg you will see the tiny watts ANY of us generate relative to watts on a bike or watts running with Stryde. the 12 year old girl will generate even smaller watts on the vasa erg than any of us, but the 12 year old girl does not have a body as large as ours to move through the water. With the right timing her available Force per stroke x stroke rate (which equals watts) will move her through the water much faster. She’s got a smaller body in the first place generating less drag and has the specific strength to hold streamline while propellign with those tiny watts. Its just a lot more available watts relative to her drag so it end up as a watts/CdA equation where the size of the body has a positive upside on available watts and the size of the body also results in worse CdA but its dragging down the denominator more than its jacking up the numerator for these pre teens. But pro adult swimmers produce larger sustained watts for their drag profile!!! AOS swimmers, we’re not in that boat.
1 Like
I imagine that if we grabbed a rock climber with great strength-to-weight ratio for their shoulder and lat muscles, they’d be slow swimmers as well. They don”t have the swim-specific strength needed to generate force right at/after the catch. They might have a decent back-half stroke though. And, as Dev said, there is strength required to get a good streamline to reduce drag.
So I would say if you take the points made by @lightheir and @devashish_paul and say what are the Watts and W/CdA of swimmers of different pace for 100m you might get to a “target power”.
But I suspect that when you get that and compare it to say 40x lat pull down that your “slow” Pro swimmers will show that they have the strength that you’re talking about.
At least you’d have a target though.
A while ago I was reading that Phelps and Lochte could do 28 pull ups. That is roughly the number of strokes that Phelps needs to do a 100 fly which means that each of his strokes he can apply enough force to lift his entire body weight (100 percent of body weight) and he is doing this in 49 seconds.
So my best straight up for pull up effort when I was a lot younger was 22. I don’t know what I can do all out (I don’t want to find out any more at age 59) but recently 5x10 was no problem. I then counted my stroked for 100 fly and it was 44 strokes. So clearly I can’t do 100 percent of my body weight for 44 strokes, so what could I get to? Well it was barely 2/3 of my body weight which translates into that being my problem in the 100 fly (among many other things including thoracic mobility). If one guy can apply 100 percent of his weight in force for 100 fly and the other guy can only apply 2/3 it is no surprise I take more than 50% longer than Phelps.
I get to watch a lot of youth swimming. I watched the 2nd fastest 12 year old girl in the country this past year (she is now 13). The stroke rate theory isn’t all that valid. The power per drag theory is. These kids just swim a lot better than the average AGer or even a lot of pro triathletes. Some people just feel the water and can hold body position way better. I know of smaller kids that have amazing stroke rates too. That gets hard to maintain as they grow and gain mass.
The fast swimmers that take long smooth strokes don’t look fast. My daughter looks slow when I’m just watching. Her stroke counts are low compared to her peers. The clock doesn’t lie though.
Watch Katie Ledecky on video. She looks slow but she is way fast. I don’t know how many pull ups she can do. Kiddo might meet her the next few summers, she could ask.
I think the role of strength in swimming is being overstated. Drag is the real enemy in the water. Reducing drag and area will result in way more time gains. A lot of us, me included need to work on reducing the area we expose to the water during our stroke.
1 Like
[quote=“AnthonyS, post:28, topic:1283457, full:true”]
I get to watch a lot of youth swimming. I watched the 2nd fastest 12 year old girl in the country this past year (she is now 13). The stroke rate theory isn’t all that valid. The power per drag theory is. These kids just swim a lot better than the average AGer or even a lot of pro triathletes. Some people just feel the water and can hold body position way better. I know of smaller kids that have amazing stroke rates too. That gets hard to maintain as they grow and gain mass.
The fast swimmers that take long smooth strokes don’t look fast. My daughter looks slow when I’m just watching. Her stroke counts are low compared to her peers. The clock doesn’t lie though.
Watch Katie Ledecky on video. She looks slow but she is way fast. I don’t know how many pull ups she can do. Kiddo might meet her the next few summers, she could ask.
I think the role of strength in swimming is being overstated. Drag is the real enemy in the water. Reducing drag and area will result in way more time gains. A lot of us, me included need to work on reducing the area we expose to the water during our stroke. [/quote]
Anthony - I too have watched many, many young swimmers over my 40 yrs of swimming. And certainly, reducing drag is very important. However, at the end of the day, I still maintain that it is swim-specific power that enables fast swimmers to go fast. Developing this power results in virtually all good swimmers having the classic V-shaped torso with powerful back muscles. If swimming were mainly about reducing drag, then these muscles would be much less prominent. How ever you you look at it, when we swim we are literally pulling ourselves through the water, and hence those pulling muscles get very well developed.
1 Like
Is there a difference between short/middle distance swimmers…and endurance swimmers (I’m asking, because I don’t know)? Similar to the differences between track&field and marathon?
Eg, Lyles vs. Kipchoge?
1 Like
I have done some rudimentary measurements in a pool with a swim tether. From what I recall, at 1:40/scy “effort”, I was measuring ~40 lbf (average) on the tether.
So, is Ledecky generating 100 lbf in the 1500, or does she have half the drag to swim 1:02/lcm? or Both? Apparently, she and I are the same height and weight. 
There really is no difference in swimming, you have guys that can do it all from 100 to 1500 pretty well. Now there are some body differences in top swimmers, but as time has marched on, it seems there is a “type” that has emerged as the ideal.
I was really wondering more about the open water 10km types vs the pool swimmers.
One name, Maggie Mac Neil 5’6" Olympic Gold and WR holder.
There’s always the outlier that confounds all the standards…
In all of this I don’t hear much about HR and the ability to maintain high stroke rates with high heart rates. We talk a lot about distance per stroke and quite honestly I get a similar distance per stroke as Ledecky the big difference is that she does all those strokes in 1 minute and I do it all in two minutes and my heart would explode if I tried to ramp it up much higher for fifteen minutes. I suspect that the ten year old super swimmers that everyone keeps talking about have HRs that are coasting at my " atrial fibrillation" levels.
1 Like
Well since most OW 10k guys are also 1500 ones, no real difference once again. I see them all lining up before races and the 10k guys look just like the final of the 100m guys, same for the women too. Although from top to bottom there is a larger bell curve for the ladies, but that gap seems to be closing with the new modern era of swimming too…
- What exactly is Katie’s HR during the 1500?
- Why do you thin that her HR is high?
There’s nothing special about HR and stroke rate. HR is just the body’s response to blood flow demand relative to your ability…mostly as a response to increased blood CO2 concentration.
All you are really saying is that you would go anaerobic, creating mass amounts of CO2 per unit energy, which would drive your HR through the roof.
1 Like
You dont hear much about HR because it really isn’t a thing for swimmers. Of course it is something to pay attention to, and I’m sure that after workouts and races it can get dissected, but everyone just swims with an “appropriate” HR for a given distance. Sprinters less so concerned as HR is never their limiting factor. Distance swimmers will pay more attention, but of course it is all relative to each persons own HR limits…
comparing your HR to Ledecky’s or other swimmers is really pointless, you’re an old man like me and it just doesnt work the same as it did 50 years ago… (-;
Blasphemy!
1 Like
In fly that might be more relevant given it is a lifting motion but as I said above in freestyle you’re effectively weightless in the water so bodyweight is a red herring.
I’m not sure the comment about “pulling yourself along” (was that Eric?) is the only way to think of it either - plenty of coaches talk about pushing water behind you, which again gives you a mindset devoid of bodyweight.
Musculature obviously plays a part but it’s not like a pedal stroke. Imagine a bike where your effective power varied massively depending on the angle and shape of your foot as you pressed down. Now keep the same mental picture but remove the cranks and try to keep the same motion perfectly with your feet - that’s why swimming fast is hard.