Swimmers do more kicks than a soccer player, more flips than a cheerleader, more sets than a volleyball player, and more yards than a football player. Still think swimming is easy? Well, you're wrong!
Swimming is an individual or team racing sport that requires the use of one’s entire body to move through the water. In my previous blogs, I talked about the physical and mental benefits of swimming, showing that swimming is the best sport for your mental and physical health. If you have not read them yet, go check it out!!
Swimming can be dated back to the Stone Age, but did not truly become an organised sport until the early 19th century, when the National Swimming Society of Great Britain began to hold competitions. Most early swimmers used the breaststroke to get through the water, or a form of it.
Based on a stroke used by native South Americans, the first version of the crawl, now known as freestyle, featured a scissor kick. In the late 1880s, Frederick Cavill travelled to the South Seas, where he saw the natives performing a crawl with a flutter kick. Cavill settled in Australia, where he taught the stroke that was to become the famous freestyle.
Swimming has been a part of the Olympic Games since 1896. The very first Olympic events were freestyle and breaststroke, and the backstroke was added in 1904. In the 1940s, breaststrokers discovered that they could go faster by bringing both arms forward over their heads. This practice was soon banned, but gave birth to butterfly, whose first official appearance was at the 1956 Games in Melbourne. These four strokes are still the four main strokes used today. My favorite stoke has always been freestyle, but everyone has a different favorite stoke depending on what they are the best at. Women’s swimming was brought into the Olympics in 1912. The men’s and women’s programs are almost identical now, as they contain the same number of events, with only one difference: the freestyle distance is 800 metres for women and 1,500 metres for men.
Swimmers at the very beginner level may swim two to three times per week. Pure competitive swimmers train more in the range of five to nine times per week. For me, I swim six days a week, 3 of those days being double practices. That means I swim once in the morning and once at night. A typical practice for an advanced swimmer would be:
Warm up 500-800 yards, mix it up
Drill/kick mix 8 x 50 or so
Main sets: 1,500-2,500 yards with various effort levels, can include sprints, equipment, hard kicking
Cooldown: 100-200 easy
This is nowhere near the level of intensity of high school season, but I hope it gives you an idea of what swimming entails. On top of all of those yards swimming, we also have to train out of the pool with exercises such as abs, weights, and even running. If you still think swimming is an easy sport, think again, because it's the toughest sport out there.
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