RE : Other Solutions to Swim Training

The goal of dry land training is to condition, stretch and strengthen muscles that are used in swimming while building fitness and athleticism. You need to develop swim-specific strength to make you slice through the water. It is a lot tougher to fight gravity than the density of water, therefore you can sometimes get so much more from doing the right thing on the dryland. It can involve exercises like squats, leg press, leg extension, leg curl, lat pull-down, seated rowing, bent-over rowing, lateral raise, shoulder press, bench press, dumbbell curl, push-up, abdominal work and assorted stretches. If done properly, an increase in strength will result in faster swimming.

But recent research has shown that hand force (hand speed) applied to the water is really generated by the rotation of the hips, and not by the muscles of the arm. This is the concept behind the DrySwim Trainer design. The muscles that pull the arm through the water are attached within one inch of the top of the arm. With a 21" arm, the lever ratio is 1:20, which means that a 100 lbs. of pull by the shoulder muscles produces only 5 lbs. of force at the hand as it pushes back against the water. The torque generated by the larger, stronger hip muscles, on the other hand, whips the hands through the water, much like golfers or batters whip their clubs and bats through the air with a fast turn of the hips. Elite swimmers who were able to make modest increases in the acceleration of their hips doubled their peak hand force output.

The time spent on the side should be maximized so the shoulders do not break the water-line and do not produce bow waves. This reduces the frontal cross-section, reducing drag further, and also increasing the ratio between the body's water-line-length and width. Similar improvements are possible by orienting the narrowest direction of head, hands, legs and arms into the water. The torso is by far the most critical. The motion of the hand, arm, and leg from the back to the front should be in the air for as much time during the recovery stroke as possible, and in the water, oriented as hydrodynamically as possible, because the returning appendage has to move at least twice as fast as the swimmer, and in the water generates eight times the drag (which increases with the cube of the speed) of an equal amount of torso frontal area. Rotating your shoulders also adds power to one's pull by using abdominal muscles to help pull the arm through the water.