This Outdated Training Tool Could Be Hurting Your Swimming
What is Barbell Training?
The barbell has been commonplace in athletic development for decades. The term ‘barbell’ has been around since the 1870s, designed as a combination of the ‘Dumbbell’ and wooden ‘Wands’ that had been used for lightweight exercise since the 1740s. It was hardly designed to be to the best equipment for ‘strength training’.
Traditionally, barbell training is usually movements involving squatting with the barbell placed on the upper back or shoulders, bench press and deadlift variations. Other movements include Olympic weightlifting and its derivatives. It is an incredibly popular method of inducing certain types of adaptations. But how effective is this type of training? Is there a better, and safer, way to induce the physical qualities our athletes need to excel in their sport? The answer is, highly likely, yes.
Is barbell training becoming outdated?
It’s hard to find a ‘strength and conditioning’ accreditation or certification process these days that doesn’t have an Olympic weightlifting component. Barbell movements such as the Clean and Jerk and Back Squat are taught to nearly all up-and-coming coaches and sport science students, telling them this is one of the best ways to induce athletic characteristics. It’s not, it’s simply one of many ways and the issue lies when they aren’t taught to question the use of the traditional approaches.
We find it difficult to buy into the process that a swimming athlete needs a heavy barbell on their back starting from a standing position to be an effective method of lower body training. A barbell baring down on an athlete, whose shoulders are already at an increased risk of injury just doesn’t make sense. Barbell Deadlifts are also a pain in the arse. They are difficult for some athletes to get into a good position, the bar is in front of the body which increases the load on the low back and it’s just often uncomfortable for the athlete. Barbell bench press… for swimming athletes this is a no-go, just don’t do it. We’ll cover this subject later. Traditional barbell movements just don’t fit athletic development for most sports, if your sport doesn’t involve a barbell… why exactly should barbell movements be the focus of the programme? If your sport is Powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting you’d be an idiot not to use barbells, but swimming, athletics, archery, badminton, golf, tennis… why are barbells the staple in these programmes?
Another issue is a lot of swimming athletes are coached by people who are not fully immersed in swimming, they often want to work in the more popular sports such as Rugby, Football or Tennis (which is perfectly fine) and therefore don’t spend enough time learning about what swimming athletes need. This results in swimming athletes receiving a bastardised programme originally suited to an athlete from a different sport.
Alternative training methods
On reflection, we actually only programme barbell movements in an extremely select few situations. They are good during warm-ups as a quick way to load a movement to prepare the athlete for the upcoming session (using an unloaded barbell) but even in this case a resistance band or Kettlebell is preferred, they are a practical way to load jumps to increase power output during certain times of the year (although a weighted vest is our preferred method) and they are useful in non-conventional exercises such as Landmine variations. Other than this, we don’t use conventional barbells.
In place of the traditional barbell comes the Trapbar, an unbelievable piece of equipment. This allows the athlete to start in a position similar to starts and turns and allows them to self-organise to produce high amounts of force, take up muscle slack and practice good body positions during the lift much more so than having an uncomfortable heavy barbell resting on their shoulders. Other methods include body mass exercises, resistance bands, and loaded jumping of varying resistance.
In our observations, we have never seen such fantastic performance improvements since ditching traditional barbell training. We should not allow old thought processes to cloud our judgements, nor should we allow our own bias towards certain types of training to become damaging to an athlete’s potential. We have used barbell training before, we are still open to using it but as time goes on it becomes more apparent that there are simply much better training methods.