BUILDING MUSCLE REQUIRES adding resistance training into your workout routine. You might wonder if that includes swimming, and if your pool-based training is going to actually help you get swole with every stroke.
The answer is a bit more complicated. The density of water means you get more resistance from every movement than you would on land. So, even though you won’t be building muscles like Arnold without traditional weight training, you can make some serious strength gains in the pool. Lap swimming already does that for your upper body and legs. And, with a little creativity, you’ll be able to use the water in different ways to hit the rest of your body, too.
“You must do short, high-intensity work, which requires an entirely different approach than people usually take in lap swimming,” says Terry Heggy, a Level 3 USMS coach, NASM-certified personal trainer, and head coach of Team Sopris Masters in Glenwood Springs, CO. “It’s about choosing the right motion, the right resistance, and the right number of repetitions.”
We asked Heggy, along with Beth Jones, a swim coach and personal trainer with PlayTri in Dallas, to explain how to get the biggest muscle-building benefits from each exercise in the pool. Here are a few exercises to add to your next swim workout.
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The Exercises
Tombstone Drill
Take your kick up a notch. Here, the board creates extra resistance so you have to engage your hip flexors, quads and hamstrings more than you would in a standard kick set, explains Jones. If you don’t feel it in these areas, you may be kicking from your knees. “Instead, think of kicking with a straight leg, but a soft knee,” she says.
How to Do It:
- Hold your kickboard vertically in the water, so that the flat part is facing you.
- Kick. Hard.
- Do that for one to two lengths of the pool. Then leave the kickboard on the deck and do one to two more lengths of sprint kicking.
Kickboard Press and Pull
This move might annoy anyone you’re sharing a lane with, Heggy says, but it will help strengthen your chest and arms.
“You have to approach it as an explosive motion if you want to entice your muscles to grow,” he says. “You don’t need to do it for a minute each time—you should be able to get yourself cranking within 10 to 15 seconds.”
This works the pecs, shoulders, and upper back, and trains both the pushing and pulling motions in the same exercise. To make it harder, dunk the kickboard deeper underwater.
How to Do It:
- Stand in shallow water and hold the kickboard like you would for the tombstone drill—grab the top and bottom in each hand and have the flat part facing the wall.
- Start with it close to your chest, then push it away from you and pull it back as fast as you can.
- Do this as fast as you can to fatigue. Try to do that three times.
The “Gutbuster”
You won’t get too far down the pool before recognizing why Heggy calls this core-training drill the Gutbuster. “It gets really hard really fast,” he says.
This exercise gets all your core muscles, from your rib cage to your hips, involved, and the inherent instability of flutter kicking in water helps all the stabilizer muscles “understand they need to participate,” says Heggy, similar to what working on a Bosu or other unstable surface does on land. (Check out the smart way to use a Bosu on land, too.)
How to Do It:
- Hold a kickboard in your “lap.” Keep your torso vertical and bring your legs parallel to the surface of the water, so your body is in an “L” shape.
- With your back to the other end of the pool, start doing a flutter kick and moving yourself down the pool.
- Resist the urge to lean back partway down the pool to straighten your abs to make it easier. Swim two laps, take a break, and repeat.
Dry Shoulder Treading Water
It sounds simple, but treading water requires way more muscle activation than you might think. This extra challenge makes it that much more difficult.
“If you do these really hard and fast, and you’re really strong, you can get your sternum out of the water,” Heggy says. This works the rear deltoids and forearms.
How to Do It:
- Facing a wall, start treading.
- Keep your hands at about armpit level and sweep your arms and hands outward (so palms are facing the sides of the pool), then sweep them back toward each other (palms facing each other).
- Move them out and in as quickly as possible.
Starting Block Pull-Ups/Curls
If your pool has starting blocks, use them to your advantage.
These aren’t fancy, nor is there only one way to do them. You’re basically just using your body weight for resistance,” Heggy says. And the water’s buoyancy can be helpful if you’re an athlete who’s just starting to work on pull-ups. Vary the resistance based on where you put your feet on the wall. “Mixing up the hand grip, hand width, and elbow angle enables you to target different muscle groups.”
How to Do Starting Block Bicep Curls:
- Grab the rung of the starting block with your palms facing towards you.
- Place your feet up on the wall and allow the elbows to fully extend.
- Without moving your upper arm, curl at the elbow to bring your body up to the bar.
- The farther you move your feet down on the wall, the easier it will be. The higher up, the more difficult.
How to Do Starting Block Pullups:
- Grab the rung of the starting block with your palms facing away from you.
- Let your body hang with full extension at the elbows.
- Allow the elbows to fan out, and squeeze your shoulder blades together to clear your chin up and over the bar.
Kicks with Rotation
This is pretty much nobody’s favorite drill the first time they do it, but it’s great for your core and for your swim technique. Basically, you’re going to kick down the pool with your hands at your sides. Leading with your head. No arms to help you out.
It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. Keep your kicks nice and small, “as if your legs are in a circular garbage can and you can’t kick outside that circle,” Jones says. “I’m a big fan of using a swim snorkel,” she says, so you don’t have to worry about breathing and can just think about how to engage your core. If you don’t have one, sneak in a breath when you need it. Either way, this seemingly simple drill requires you to recruit your core, which makes you swim better (and look great on deck, too).
How to Do It:
- Push off the wall face down, hands at your sides.
- Turn your body to face the right side of the pool—your navel will be facing the right-hand wall of the pool. Keep a steady flutter kick going and use your hips to turn your navel to the left wall (no arms, no hands).
- Do a few kicks that way and turn back to the right, and so on until you’re at the other end. Switch to the other side when you lose stability on the one you’re working.
Swim with Paddles
If your stroke is already pretty efficient, do a segment of your swim workout with swim paddles, says Jones. These add even more resistance so you build your lats. Paddles should be only a little larger than your hand, and should have enough holes in them to take away some of the stress on your shoulders. Start with a short set—even as little as 200 yards or meters—and gradually work up to using them for longer ones.
If you’re a beginning swimmer, wait a while before using paddles, since stroke errors—like the very common one of letting your elbow drop to the bottom of the pool—can put huge, unhelpful, injury-producing stress on your shoulders when you add paddles to the equation. That builds pain, not muscle.
The Parachute Pull
Everything gets tougher and more muscle-building when you try to swim against resistance. With regular swimming, you’re trying to take as much drag out of your stroke as possible. But to do the muscle-building job, you want to add some, and there are a number of ways to do it.
One is with a “parachute” that you clip around your waist (about $16 to $30) that does exactly what you’d expect—it holds you back in the water, explains Heggy. “You get enough resistance that you’re going to fail pretty quickly, and that’s what stimulates muscle growth,” he says. On deck, it looks tiny, but in the water, will feel like you have a whole BASE jumping rig behind you. You can also wear a swimming drag suit—these have little “pockets” in them that trap water flow and make swimming harder—or just wear a pair of baggy shorts in the water. But “the commercial gear provides a better range of added resistance while helping you keep good form during the exercise,” Heggy says.
