I am a devoted swimmer. I’m currently swimming a little over a mile 3 days a week.
I am 5’8" tall and I weigh 300 pounds. This means that I am extremely buoyant in water…you’d have to weigh me down with cement shoes to drown me, I’m like the barrels they use in “Jaws” to keep the shark from diving.
On the other hand, I am obviously dragging a very significant weight through the water when I swim, and I also have quite a bit of surface area, with bulges that keep me from presenting anything resembling a sleek profile.
My current swimming pace is a lap per minute, my regular workout is 50 laps in 50 minutes. My heart and lungs are getting very strong (for me), and I’m finding it difficult to swim fast and hard enough to tax them the way I was able to when I was less fit. I simply am not powerful enough to propel myself through the water a whole lot faster than I am right now.
So my semi-idle question is this: What impact is my weight, shape and buoyancy having on my swimming capability, and given these factors, how can I judge what I am actually accomplishing?
In other words, is my pace impressive, given my girth and weight, which make swimming fast much more difficult for me, or barely acceptable, given my floatitude? Do the different factors cancel each other out? I know that my strong, relatively normal weight friends can’t do 5 laps without falling apart, but that’s because they don’t swim regularly.
Hmmm. I would guess that your buoyancy doesn’t make a huge difference, and here’s why: I’m 6’1", 160lbs, and I almost float. So if I’m swimming, it’s not like I’m doing a lot of work to stay at the surface. Your weight, and to a lesser extent your figure, probably make things pretty hard for you.
I don’t know how your pace is, but you should specify the lap length anyway. 25m? 50m? It seems really weird that you’re swimming as fast as you can but not tiring yourself out very much…
Keep up the good work! I may be a skinny bastard, but damn, I’m out of shape.
You also might try getting a kickboard and kicking some laps. That should include flutter, whip, and dolphin kicks. Kicking is obviously less efficient than a crawl and will help in your stroke technique.
Are you varying strokes, by the way? Try breast stroking a few hundred yards as fast as you can go. It’ll vary the muscles being used too.
And if you’re feeling masochistic, try the Egyptian Crawl. Just swim in a normal freestyle but keep one foot out of the water at all times. Try not to drown…
Dolphin kick laps? Weights on the wrists and ankles?
I’m 6’5" and 350, and probably of similar waist size, but I haven’t tried swimming in a while. I’ll try tomorrow, when I was a relatively lanky lad of 245, I couldn’t keep my nose above water without swimming.
And I don’t need a kickboard to simply kick. I swim with a snorkel mask because it kind of defeats my purpose if I have to deal with catching my breath when I’m trying to increase my fitness. Using the snorkel I can breathe as hard as I need to and it doesn’t slow me down a bit. So, between that and my buoyancy, and I can just leave my arms at my sides, or even hold my hands behind my back and I can just kick. I can also reverse it, hold my legs together and just pull with my arms. Yesterday for the first time I added webbed gloves to increase resistence for the first half. And I feel it today, which is good.
I don’t break it up as much as i used to because freestyle is my fastest and I’m sorta addicted to hitting my laps in my minutes and I’m striving to do it faster every time. I breast stroke sometimes at the ends of the laps just as a sort of rest, and to give my inner thighs a workout.
Flutter kick: Normal freestyle and backstroke kick.
Whip kick: Used in breaststroke. Ideally you turn your feet outwards when you draw your knees up and push with the inside surfaces of your legs and feet.
Dolphin kick: Butterfly. Feet together and pretend you’re a dolphin.
I’m going to suggest ditching the snorkel. Part of the power in free style comes from the roll and the hips. You breath when you roll onto your side. You also get more length from each stroke.
You should not hold your arms at your side when you swim, it is poor form, though because you are more bouyant I don’t think you see it. Your breast stroke should also tire you out because it uses the most muscles, you are just using different ones.
I’m going to say what I said in the other thread, join a masters group, they have all ranges and all ages. I have never seen anyone turned away because of how fast they swim even though people keep telling me they don’t want to join a “team” because they don’t swim well. You will get a better workout and improve your stroke. You also need to vary what you do. If you can do a lap, which for you seems to be once up and back, in a minute, then swim harder for that lap and start the next one on something like 1:20-1:30. They are not going to be easy, especially at first but you will get a better workout over all. Do something like 10-20 of those, you will not get as much distance, but you will get a better workout. You can’t do the same speed you are doing now though, you will have to do it in something like 50 seconds.
If you let me know what types of strokes you can do I can come up with a couple of workouts for you if you want. I still suggest a Masters team though.
I appreciate the truth of this, but dealing with breathing just screws me up completely. I can do it, I know perfectly well how to swim properly, I just don’t like it. In addition to all the exertion/timing issues, I can’t stand getting water in my mouth, up my nose, blech. Public pools…blech. Little fetishy thing.
I contacted the local masters today. There is a chapter, not surprisingly, at the Y where I swim. I’ll check it out, and thanks for the tips. I think the time is certainly coming or here when I have to get over my attachment to distance/time and start changing it up.
This really does not answer your question, but it is swimming related and maybe someone will find it amusing. I think I swim funny because when I do the crawl, I use a frog -0r whip-kick. Is this an actual stroke, as I think it is (Australian Crawl…Trudgeon Crawl?) or is it something I made up and got into the habit of doing? I cannot do the flutter kick to save my life, and when I manage to do it at all, I get nowhere. Maybe it’s because I have a low center of gravity, or, like I say, it’s just a habit, but I can’t help noticing the swim team regarding me oddly.
I think that your shape may indeed cause drag, but your ability to do the lengths that you do is quite impressive, and it’s funny that you mention that you use a snorkel. I had the idea to do this at my gym, but I was too self-concious as no one else seems to have the same idea, but now I think I’ll just get over it.
I can say that I’ve never heard of anyone else doing this. You have the same problem that many people have, especially men, their feet sink. As a guy I seem to be different, my legs float so I can pull all day long and not worry about my feet. There are a couple of things to do about this. One you can get a pull bouy, this goes between your legs to let them float. I hate the damn things.
Or you can learn to kick. You do not need to kick very much, two kicks per stroke. You may also be trying to breath forward instead of on your side which will cause your legs to sink. However, power does not come from your kick, it comes from the arms and rolling for your body. Your legs are to stabalize you.
Stoid, do look into the Masters team, they will help you learn to swim better so that you might be able to get rid of your snorkel. Also if you happen to come across a bad team, find another one, as of yet I haven’t come across a bad team, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Most are willing to help and they have seen many people who can not swim well.
