![]() While freestyle is a great way to open them up, most shoulder issues with swimming arise from coming in with bad shoulder mobility and overemphasizing the arms when swimming. If you’re sitting at a desk all day, your shoulders will be internally rotated. But remember that while it’s great for the shoulders, it’s smart to have good shoulder mobility before you get in the water. It’s great for the shoulders, back, and scaps, plus it strengthens a lot of important stabilizers, rotational muscles, and oft-neglected muscles like the serratus anterior.Ībove all, it’s comparatively low skill. ![]() But freestyle is the go-to, and it’s the one that may translate best to strength sports. ![]() “It’s working a lot of areas that are hard to work unless you’re doing a full rehab prehab program,” says Babenko.Ī post shared by Katrín Tanja Davíðsdóttir Tipsĭifferent strokes have different effects - breaststroke opens the hips, butterfly is great for fast twitch muscles, and backstroke may be the best for shoulder mobility. The rotator cuffs, the obliques, the neck - nothing gets left out. Swimming is also damn hard work and excellent for aerobic conditioning and heart health, but what really sets it apart from other forms of cardio is its restorative properties: it improves mobility, deloads the joints, and it trains a lot of muscles that tend to get neglected in the gym. Master swimming, and your lifting form (“Where are my hips during the first pull again?”) may improve. Many athletes know that the body awareness that gymnasts and dancers develop has tremendous carryover to strength sports, but a great thing about swimming is that the sensation of the water helps to improve your awareness of where your body is situated in space. That will generally translate very well to the weight room, especially in Olympic weightlifting and functional fitness where mobility is much more important.”Īnother important benefit is proprioception. “Strength is closely tied to having maximum mobility, and swimming is one of the best ways to increase extensibility of your tissues. “It’s phenomenal for conditioning, but it’s also uniquely beneficial for strength,” says Bo Babenko DPT, a New York-based doctor of physical therapy, strength coach, and BarBend contributor. And the restorative powers of a regular swimming habit are too numerous to ignore. What we want to look at is how swimming can benefit strength athletes. We’re not saying those claims are necessarily true - there are plenty of studies that say swimming is perfectly good for weight loss, though the increase in appetite could explain why studies are conflicting. There are even studies that up and down swear that swimming is less useful than land-based exercise for weight loss and diabetes management. (Potentially true.) As you become more effective at swimming, you burn fewer calories. It stokes the appetite so much it makes it harder to lose weight. There’s this persistent belief that swimming just isn’t great cardio. Swimming rarely makes an appearance in conditioning plans, and we’re here to change that.
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