One Of The Worst Training Methods For Swimming Backed By Research
… Here we go. We are finally addressing this plague that seems to be circulating in the swimming world and its obsession with high work rates to force some oxidative adaptation or whatever it’s being used for.
The swimming world in particular seems obsessed with making its athletes do incredible amounts of volume both in and out of the pool. While we are not always against a high volume of training in the water if it is appropriate for the athletes in terms of biological maturation, training age, history and level, we are against making athletes do completely unnecessary volumes away from the pool. A common training method is ‘circuit training’ where loads of different activities are repeated for time or number of reps. You sweat a lot, lie on the floor afterwards writing your last will and testament and sometimes vomit.
In recent years circuit training has been made into a brand, repackaged, glorified and called CrossFit. CrossFit is an activity that incorporates a vast variety of tasks, Olympic weightlifting, running, throwing shit around etc… so circuit training basically. For the general population, there’s not a whole lot wrong with circuit training assuming there is a good level of coaching quality and it can be done safely. The issue, however, is when athletes are asked to undertake this type of training as their primary method of land training (strength and conditioning).
Athletes need quality land training that will first and foremost cause them no harm, to themselves or their performances, while building their athletic qualities to be able to improve their sporting performances be this is through increased force and power application, improved motor learning, increase resilience to training etc. Athletes don’t get this through circuit training alone. Performing reps for reps sake under a time restriction in a completely random programme with little to no regard for movement quality (let’s not discuss kipping Pull-Ups shall we?) is not optimal training for athletes. This is before we need to discuss the specificity of training both mechanical and metabolic (and not, we don’t mean MetCons). Consistency is needed for adaptation, too much variation and you are just messing about in a gym for little reason, you’re not getting better.
This problem is magnified at the youth level. Most kids don’t want to lift barbells or follow rules as to how they should move. Kids want to run about, play, jump over things and have some fun! Youth development is a fine art, you need to keep them engaged, have fun, allow them to express creativity. Circuit training only gets one thing right with youth training, variation. Youth athletes need a more varied training programme, but the idea behind this is to expose them to a huge amount of different skills, skills rarely ever seen in conventional circuit training. We mean skills like sprinting, agility, kicking, throwing, catching, jumping, rolling, proprioceptive, callisthenics etc, and these are only the physical qualities we look to expose youth athletes with, not to mention cognitive and emotional skills such as leadership, teamwork, communication, problem-solving, handling losing etc.
Needless to say, we don’t like CrossFit for athletes. Even the CrossFit slogan is wrong, ‘Fittest on Earth’… the term ‘fitness’ is contextual. You can’t do a load of random exercise and claim to be the worlds fittest person. Caeleb Dressel is one of the fittest people on earth at 100m Butterfly, but he probably isn’t going to beat Eliud Kipchoge in the marathon (sorry Caeleb). So in terms of the marathon, Dressel’s fittest is low, same for Kipchoge in the 100m Butterfly. Athletes are conditioned to be fit in their specific sports, aim and objectives.
Land training is so much more than creating a sweat, feeling ‘the burn’ and being sick into the nearest bin. Sadly, a lot of the swimming world does not share this view. The obsession with circuits away from the pool is everywhere, it’s outdated, it’s ineffective and it needs to stop.
Finally, a question for the swimming coaches out there… If you need your athletes doing excessive circuit training, just how ineffective is your pool work?