The Olympic Lifts and Swimming, Perfect Match or Destruction?
The use of Olympic weightlifting techniques and derivatives are now extremely commonplace in ‘strength and conditioning’ programmes across the world. This training method is often used to increase the rate of force development (RFD) in athletes and involve the use of the Snatch and the Clean and Jerk to produce the desired adaptation, such as power output and speed strength. There are several times and sporting contexts where the Olympic lifts might be required, however, this type of training is now becoming used without critical analysis and a solid rationale.
Often the goal with the Olympic lifts is RFD, producing as much force as quickly as possible. This makes sense right? Surely in swimming starts and turns RFD is important? Well, not as important as you might think. RFD is only shown to have a moderate correlation to the track start performance in elite swimmers, and it is well established that high performing starts are not executed as fast as possible and require time to generate high impulses. This requires a compromise of spending enough time on the block to generate such impulses, but not too long to avoid being left at the start nor too little and thus reducing the impulse production. The idea of Olympic lifts is to accelerate the bar, not the centre of mass. Swimming requires the acceleration of the centre of mass to change athlete momentum as much as possible by generating large impulses (impulse-momentum relationship).
Olympic lifts may produce high amounts of force and power, but the time frame in which this happens is unlikely to transfer or apply to the constraints of swimming. Track starts can be as little as 0.7s, backstroke starts can be as low as 0.5s in elite examples, including the reaction time. Are the full Olympic lifts able to reflect this short timeframe? Not likely.
Next time we’ll talk about Olympic weightlifting derivatives and how they measure up for use in swimming land-based athletic development.
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