Summer in Pakistan is a happy season for aqua lovers. Seasonal as well as professional swimmers make a special effort to spend extra time in the few swimming pools that are available across the country. Those friends who know about my interest keep asking me several questions regarding training protocols suitable for young as well as professional swimmers.

To be honest, I never felt qualified to answer the intriguing queries regarding swimming. Therefore, I resorted to some of the best research works carried out by world renowned swimming coach Cecil M Colwin, who developed various Olympic medallists and world record holders. Colwin due to his outstanding coaching achievements was inducted into International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1993 and was awarded the prestigious Paragon Award in 2002.

According to Colwin, training and swimming without a coach could be fun but no visible improvement can be noticed unless a qualified and committed coach works constantly with the athlete.

The coach should know the complete training history of every swimmer. This knowledge helps the coach to carefully plan the workloads in accordance with each swimmer’s capacity. Swimmers react differently to the same training workload, and have different potentials for improvement.

In the regime of hard training a swimmer should never overlook the importance of a good diet and adequate rest. Quality rest is even more important than diet, as it allows the body to regenerate and fight out stress. In fact, rest is regarded as unseen training.

It is important to remember that competitive swimming is ultimately an individual sport. Particularly at the higher levels of competition where really talented athletes are involved, it has become absolutely necessary to know a great deal about the individual athlete to fully develop that person’s potential.

In our case it has been noticed that training schedules have been adopted from the requirements of a few champion athletes or around the average needs of the group, which is at best a shotgun approach.

During the development of novice competitors, the shotgun method works for a while, but regardless of the swimmer’s level of maturity, it will not produce the best possible results. In this type of programme, it is common to hear much about the success of a few outstanding swimmers but little about the large number of those who fail.

A well-planned conditioning programme should thus enable a swimmer gradually to improve the psychological qualities necessary to produce peak performances in major meets. Effective training thus consists of cycles of varied activity, each aimed to acquire a specific purpose.

A typical season for a seasoned swimmer should start for a daily half-hour session of weight training for the first eight to twelve weeks. Later in the season the frequency is reduced to three days a week. The coach emphasises the importance of strength training in swimming to retain strength gains to its maximum.

Nort Thornton, one of the pioneers of weight training for swimming, when coaching a world record breaker swimmer Steve Clarke, stressed that strength training and flexibility workouts should always be done together and that not doing them together is a big mistake. Swimmers of Thornton’s team at University of Berkeley lift very heavy weights on three alternate days, while the other three days are dedicated to a biokinetic swim bench aimed towards developing speed, strength and rhythm.

Counsilman, a renowned master swimmer, refers to bio-kinetics as the ultimate exercise which permits a swimmer to accelerate the simulated swimming stroke while recruiting muscle fibers in the same sequence as actual swimming. In our sports culture where trainers are busy motivating athletes with jargon only, the bio-kinetic machine is the only exercise machine capable of measuring work done in terms of force, time and distance thus providing a solid scientific base for training of athletes.

According to the best international swimming coaches much emphasis should be given to establishing efficient stroke mechanics in the early season. A swimmer must feel and control the flow of water. This should be done during warm up and throughout the workout.

Emphasis should be placed on taking fewer strokes per length of the pool at a given speed. In other words, they should keep the speed constant and reduce the number of strokes per length. As the season progresses, speed should increase while the number of strokes either remains the same or is reduced. This ability is a reliable indicator of a swimmer’s improving fitness and efficiency.

Most of the swimming training routines refer to differences between duration and intensity of exercise. Thornton introduced two concepts of training referring to them as base training and sharpening training.

Thornton describes base training as the inner basic strength of the swimmer that results from years of training and produces performance without specific muscle adaptation for an event. Whereas for sharpening, Thornton recommends specific training techniques that produce efficient muscular coordination for the chosen event.

He believes that pace work, such as broken swims or ideal pace rehearsal swims, conditions the reflexes for peak efficiency at speed. Thus, sharpening work is focused on muscular neurological development. Whereas base training conditions the circulatory system. Thornton is of the opinion that perfection depends upon ideal proportions of base work and sharpening. Too many swimmers were either constantly sharpening or devoting little time to developing the essential base conditioning.

Swimmers should remember that no one form of training suits every situation. Long, slow-distance training involves long swims at a steady pace. This type of swimming conditions cardiovascular system, develops robust health, develops swimmer’s base level and has a de-sharpening effect, thus permitting the swimmer to conserve adaptation energy.

Those swimmers who want to develop speed should adopt interval speed training also known as frequent repetitions. This training teaches the swimmer to relax and not to wrestle in water when swimming at speed. It develops muscular strength, efficient coordination, has a fast, sharpening effect and often results in rapid improvement. However, this kind of training should be carried out with care because it robs the swimmer of adaptation energy and if continued without intervals could cause illness, injuries and poor performance and can draw a swimmer into slump quickly if done improperly.

It’s also very important for swimmers to understand the energy continuum and how different compounds like adenosine triphosphate work in anaerobic training and how skilled swimmers engage different kinds of energy systems in training and competitions. They should also know about the chemical changes that take place in muscles and how to maintain constant supply of oxygen.

To simplify the training methodology, the swimmers should focus on three types of training for different swimming events. They are aerobic, anaerobic and sprint training. Aerobic training enables a swimmer to maintain a faster rate of speed through the middle stage of any race. Anaerobic training will help a swimmer to better withstand the accumulative effects of fatigue and sprint training assists a swimmer in developing faster initial speed.

Swimming like athletics and gymnastics forms the nucleus of mother sports. With 37 events it has the second highest number of medals to be contested after athletics in any international games like Olympics. Unfortunately, the coaching and training standard in the sport of swimming in Pakistan is as good or bad as in other sports.

I hope that this knowledge will help you in better understanding some training aspects of this demanding sport. There is a lot more to know, understand and apply to become successful swimmers. I am sure that your swimming coaches who are not merely “life guards” will coach you better, or at least you can question the trainers regarding different training methodologies, thus becoming literate swimmers who are aware of their training protocols.

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