Here in Southern California, it's always swimming weather, but for some reason, people respect the change of 'seasons' (such as they are) and swarm to swimming holes largely during the summer months.  I suppose it's for the same reason that when Santa visits the outdoor mall in early December and it's a balmy 68 degrees out, he's still dressed as if the Cold-Miser is nipping at his heels.  L.A.:  Even Our Seasons are Fake.®

So, now that the dog days of summer are upon us, a lot of people will be hitting the pools, I'm going to offer a few words about swimming.

Swimming, it must be said, isn't typically seen as a tough-guy activity, and I'm trying to figure out why that is.  The Navy SEALS are certainly tough guys, and it takes at least a certain sang-froid to be able to happily exist in an element that can kill you...I'm reminded of a Haiku written by a precocious 11-year-old whose name escapes me:

Water:  It gives life,
But it can kill just the same.
This is water's game.

(With practice, you too can be a beast in the water.)

Nevertheless, I get the feeling that the macho guys don't go in much for swimming.  One reason might be that guys with big muscles aren't natural swimmers.  They tend to sink, for one, and they tend to try to muscle their way through the water, for another, neither of which makes for great swimming efficiency.  Swimming efficiency is all about being one with the water, and big guys aren't much into being one with much of anything except their monster trucks (I kid, big guys, come on back...)  I think that may be part of why you don't see a lot about swimming on websites dedicated to getting big and buff.  I remember seeing some reality TV show a few years ago in which one team had to choose an athletic event for each member of the opposing team.  The big, buff guys, who would have smoked everyone at tests of raw strength and short-distance speed, sank like rocks.

But knowing how to swim well--not just stay afloat--is a great skill to have, regardless of your body comp.  Think of all the times James Bond has had to swim his way to safety over the year, typically onto a yacht with a gorgeous--and unaccountably, single--blonde on board.  James Bond movies are, of course, precise mirrors of our everyday reality, and therefore, everyone who fancies him- or herself fit should know how to swim reasonably well.  As I've said before, half of the motivation for fitness is getting prepped for every possible apocalyptic emergency; these days, it seems as likely that we'll be drowning in the remnants of the Polar Ice Caps as anything else. 

So:  learn to swim.

I went over some of the basics in my old blog; here I just want to correct a misconception about swimming training that I keep seeing popping up everywhere. 

Swimming often gets lumped in with running, cycling, stairmastercising and the like as a kind of run-of-the-treadmill cardio workout.  Meaning, you can do it for long, slow, distance or you can do it for short intervals, and that you can program these workouts just as you would a long run or a sprint workout, respectively.

To some extent, that's true:  you COULD get in the pool and swim 45 minutes worth of laps; you COULD do 30 second sprint intervals with a 90 second rest period up and down the pool.  You'd derive some fitness benefit from both types of training.

But in the water there are better ways of going about it.

In swimming, mechanics are most of the battle.  Guessing wildly, if nailing your cycling or running mechanics can make you 15% faster, nailing your swimming mechanics can make you 50% faster.  Bad swimming mechanics, conversely, can make you 200% slower.*

The reason is that water is way denser than air, so drag in the water is far more detrimental to your speed than drag on dry land.  You've got to learn to be hydrodynamic.

Plenty of books, seminars, webisodes, and prayer meetings are dedicated to this very thing.  What I'm here to tell you is that form starts to go out the window when you get tired.  After a few laps, even the best swimmers become less efficient.  So it's far better to drill swimming in relatively short distances than in one long, slow effort. 

Working up to the occasional long swim isn't a bad idea--it's essential if you're gearing up to compete in a long swim, of course--but the bulk of your workouts should consist of shorter efforts that allow you to optimize your form on each lap. 

But interval training in swimming is different from interval training on land.  I don't quite know why, but you can recover much faster from an all-out swimming effort than you can from an all-out sprint.  If I sprint all-out on land for a minute straight, for example, I'm not really able to catch my breath for a good two minutes or so.  If I do 100 meters in the pool at top speed, which takes me well over a minute to complete (don't snicker too loud, all you fish out there), I can go again in 30 seconds without too much trouble.

So instead of going with a 1:1 or a 1:2 work/rest ratio in your intervals, as you might on land, try about a 3:1:  swim for 45 seconds, rest for 15.  You'll be surprised how fast your heart rate drops (I suspect this has something to do with the heart not having to work as hard to circulate the blood when you're more or less weightless underwater, but I'm no fancy cardiologist or nothin.'

Finally, because you don't want to be stuck treading water in the middle of the pool while you're interval training, you'll probably want to go for distance rather than time in your intervals:  that is, sprint 50 meters, rest, repeat.  A typical pattern is to do 50 meters on the 1:00, 100 meters on the 2:00, 150 meters on the 3:00, and so on--which means that, if you're doing 50-meter repeats, you have one minute to complete the interval AND rest before you start the next one.  Keep your eye on the clock and try to complete each successive interval effort slightly faster than the previous one. 
 
*all statistics completely made up.

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Odd fact:  cyclists have unusually low bone-density.