Swimming: Aerobic and Recovery

Lots going on at the Stanford pools today because there was a water polo match. We were all crammed into 5-6 lanes. Today's workout:

• Warm-up
• 3x: 2x 100M swimming w/ fists (like using fistgloves!), 1x 200M front crawl
• 6x: 25M fly (body only, like doing the "worm"), 25M fly
• 400M pull
• Backstroke - I missed this part because I was so slow doing the previous stuff
• 2x: 3x 50M (slow, medium, fast), 100M slow. Slow = 85% VO2 Max, "cruising speed"

Several people found the swimming with fists exercise hard. It wasn't too difficult for me because I have been practising that already. I was a lot slower than everybody else, and by a long shot, but I was at least COMFORTABLE doing it. That's the important thing - to me, anyway. The point of the drill was to force us to use our entire forearms to grip the water during the pull.

Fly was hard, especially when you don't use your arms! We were told not to pivot at the waist (a common mistake) but to reach forward & up with our head and then forward & down. It looks like a breakdancing move if you're doing it correctly. The key is to maintain a flexible spine and not strain your neck. You're also supposed to lift your head so that your chin is resting on the water when you breathe. Sounds great in theory but I couldn't do any of this!

The pull exercise was fascinating. We used pull buoys tucked in between our thighs to keep our legs afloat. I was initially wary of using one in case I developed a dependency on having an external device to assist me with buoyancy. But we only did 400M of it (I think I only did 300M) for the entire session so I should be fine. Plus I had developed a cramp in my right leg just before this exercise, so it was great being able to relax my legs and use just my arms to swim. I wasn't sure what the point of the exercise was until I swam some laps of crawl afterwards - my core rotation had increased dramatically. I was swimming much more on my side than my front.