More Than Our Story

Triathlon Tips: Dryland Training

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Swimming: Part 4

Getting better at swimming isn’t just an aquatic endeavor – strength, endurance, and flexibility can all be improved through rigorous dryland training. The pool will still be where you work on your fundamentals and technical skills, but dryland exercises play a pivotal role in enhancing your overall performance. Let’s dive into dryland training and explore how it can help propel your swimming to new heights.

What is Dryland Training

Dryland training refers to stretches, exercises and strength training performed out of the pool, that targets specific movements and muscle group essential to swimming. Its purpose is to enhance strength, improve flexibility and reduce the risk of injuries. By complementing your aquatic workouts with a dynamic assortment of dryland training exercises, you will be building yourself into a more well-rounded athlete, and better, faster swimmer. 

Building Strength and Power

Swimming relies upon your musculature to propel you through the water, and strengthen those muscles translates into direct gains in speed and power, for explosive kicks and all phases of the freestyle stroke.

Related Article: Triathlon Tips: Don’t Go It Alone

Exercises such as squats, lunges, and deadlifts help develop whole body strength. Incorporating movements such as lat pull downs, overhead press and dips and pull-ups will help strengthen your stroke, whereas leg isolating movements like leg extension and leg curls will help you develop a more powerful kick. In addition to improving muscle strength, resistance training also enhances muscle endurance, which is critical for sustained performance.

Strength Exercises:

  • Whole Body
    • Squats (front/overhead/back squats, jump squats, box squats, wall squats, really any variation of bodyweight/resistance-band/weighted squats)
    • Lunges
    • Deadlifts
    • Plank (standard or side plank)
    • Mountain Climbers
    • Kneeling Superman
    • Wood Chop
  • Upper Body & Arms
    • Pull-Ups
    • Pushups
    • Flyes (dumbbell flyes, reverse flyes)
    • Triceps (tricep extensions, tricep cable press, barbell extension)
    • Biceps (dumbbell/barbell curls)
    • Wide Grip Lat Pull Downs
    • Overhead Press (standing/seated overhead press, military press, thrusters)
    • DIps (bodyweight/weighted)
  • Lower Body & Legs
    • Leg Extensions
    • Cable Hip Extensions
    • Lying Leg Curls
    • Calf Raises (seated/standing)

Building a Stronger, More Stabile Core

Swimming engages your entire body, and a strong core is foundational to efficient and effective swimming technique. Dryland exercises targeting the core muscles – such as planks, Russian twists, and all forms of crutches – strengthen your core, enhancing your stability and body control in the water. A strong core allows swimmers to better maintain proper body alignment and minimize drag by keep your hips and legs up, and helps transfer force more effectively during each phase of the stroke, resulting in quicker, more efficiency swimming. Just like other muscle groups in your body, your core fatigues over time, so it’s important to build both strength and endurance so it can best support your body – especially on those long open water swims.

Core Exercises:

  • Plank (Standard Plank, Side Plank)
  • Mountain Climbers
  • Kneeling Supermans
  • Flat/Inclined Russian Twists (bodyweight/weighted - medicine ball, dumbbell, plates)
  • Wood Chop (bodyweight/weighted - resistance bands, cables, dumbbells, plates)
  • Crunches (flat or inverted bodyweight/weighted sit-ups or crunches)
  • Glute Bridge
  • Dead Bug

Enhancing Flexibility and Mobility

Flexibility and mobility are essential elements to swimming and dryland training is the perfect solution for improving range of motion, joint stability and flexibility. Increased range of motion and joint flexibility reduces your resistance in water, allowing you to achieve optimal body position, and execute more effective and efficient strokes with greater ease. Incorporating the following stretches, strength training and mobility drills can help:

Flexibility Exercises:

  • Stretching and
  • Foam Rolling
  • Wood Chop
  • Ankle Circles
  • Hamstring Lift
  • Kneeling Ankle Stretch
  • Neck Rotation
  • Arm/Leg Swings
  • Kneeling Hip Flexor Stretch
  • Lateral Shoulder Raise
  • Lat Stretch

Injury Prevention

The repetitive nature of swimming places significant the body under significant strain, putting swimmers at risk for injuries due to overuse or poor stroke mechanics. To prevent injuries, it’s important for swimmers to not only maintain proper technique, but to incorporate dryland training into their overall regime to help addressing muscular imbalances and strengthen and stabilize their muscles and joints. Here are some exercises that can help prevent swimming-related injuries:

Injury Prevention Exercises:

  • Planks
  • Shoulder Rotations with Resistance Bands
  • Wood Chop
  • Shoulder External Rotation (any form of resistance: band, cable, or dumbbell)
  • Lateral Shoulder Raise
  • Tricep Dips
  • Bridges (glute/hip bridge hold/reps, single-leg glute/hip bridge hold/reps, weighted glute/hip bridge)

There are several common causes of swimming injuries, including:

  • Overtraining
  • Poor stroke mechanics
  • Poor flexibility or range of motion
  • Poor core strength/stability
  • Poor breathing technique
  • Decreased rotator cuff or shoulder blade strength and stability

Mental Conditioning

Beyond building physical strength, dryland training helps with mental conditioning. Through pushing swimmers (and triathletes) through the discomforts of endurance workouts, interval training, and high-intensity circuits, they are challenged both physically and mentally, and help develop their resilience, discipline, and determination, which translates directly to improved performance in the water.

Conclusion

Dryland training is not merely complementary to swimming, it is an indispensable component. By helping to building strength, improve flexibility, preventing injuries, and build mental resilience, dryland training will help lay the groundwork for success in the pool or open water. By combining aquatic and land-based training, you will become a better, faster, more efficient, and resilient swimmer.

SOURCES

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Daniel

Daniel is an extremely curious person, a wealth of random knowledge and facts. Extremely passionate about a vast array of interests ranging from health to history, science to athletics, everything culinary and the list goes on. Trust us, you would want to be on his team for Trivial Pursuit. Daniel is also years into his battle with brain cancer. He experienced a seizure while on a Zoom call at work in late 2020 and quite literally, his life changed within minutes. After his operation he started to talk about his story but had always known it was more than just him. From then, More Than Our Story became a PROJECT that has evolved into the starting point it is today.

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