From endurance to strength to power by way of the water.

There has never been an athlete I've known, coached, or competed against that didn't want to become as strong as possible. The serious competitors all wanted to have a solid athletic build. My venue, starting in the late 1950s, was the pool where "doing weights" was considered a mistake. It was thought that more muscle would inhibit flexibility and get in the way of fast swims. The road to aquatic success, as we were constantly reminded by our coaches, was intensely moving our skinny bodies back and forth doing various swim and kick sets. Then in the early '60's strength training was seen by some visionaries more as an aid than an enemy. A few rising stars began to move free weights and pull on resistance cables to increase their strength and add some muscle endurance so they could move more water longer. This was simple and logical and proved to be an advancing concept in training.

Although most aquatic athletes and their coaches didn't realize the absolute differences between endurance, strength, and power and the importance of using correct physical preparation and progression to obtain these, they were content to simply add either a few bouts of resistance exercise a week to their in-pool training or an abbreviated session of "dry-land" work on deck each time just before entering the water. They thought they were getting one-up on their competition that stayed only in the pool. They were right.

The three elements in the title succinctly outline the appropriate progression we want the athlete to take: (1) be able to forcefully move a constant resistance again and again over an extended period of time without getting injured; this is endurance; (2) we want strength where the athlete can safely move an increased amount of resistance through several repetitions; (3) the holy grail of sports, power, is trained by moving the increased resistance quickly.

There are advantages to water-stressing the legs that have proved invaluable in close swim races, for the biking and running segments in a triathlon, and as productive cross-training for any athletic adventure that requires leg movement on land. The importance is such that I recommend cutting swim yardage or other training elements, if need be, to allocate precious training time in a tight schedule to perform leg-specific water-based exercises.

Using the Water to First Build Endurance

The normal physiology of muscle activity allows for some muscle fibers to contract while others relax. We also have been endowed with fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibers in varying percentages. The latter produce less force than the former but have more natural endurance since they have a strong blood supply carrying nutrients and oxygen. The fast-twitch fibers contract more forcefully than the slow-twitch but have no blood supply and can only fire for a relatively short period of time before fatiguing from physiologic acidic (lactic) build-up and adenosine tri-phosphate (ATP) depletion. This evolutionary fact crudely made use of natural basic endurance by giving our ancestors somewhat of a chance to survive an extended dash to the protective trees in nearby forests to escape being food for larger occupiers of the planet with bad intensions toward us. Unfortunately, this untrained natural endurance is not enough to carry us through today's sport-specific requirements for an extended period of time. And it is established physiologic fact that increasing endurance helps to protect against overuse injury by adapting the connective tissue around the joints and muscles to handle the increased loads of physical exercise we plan to endure. The wise thing to do: first adapt the body by increasing endurance.

If we bring in aquatic exercise or sports, anything that happens in the water requires more than four times the effort than it would on land, yet it spares serious wear-and-tear on the body because of the gravity-free environment water provides. For those needing their legs or to increase their general aerobic and anaerobic conditions to tackle land-based exercise or sports, working the legs and various other muscle groups in water is the smart thing to do.

Most training in the pool to build total body endurance requires swimming laps, no getting around that. It is the perfect activity to increase total body condition and to build on the components of becoming powerful. And swimming in fins allows for these benefits to happen even more quickly and to a higher degree for two reasons: (1) since the muscle groups of the legs are the single largest to be utilized at any given moment, putting them through various modes of resistive movement in the water forces the cardiovascular and respiratory systems to reach higher levels of capacity to meet metabolic demand--the heart and lungs don't know you have fins on, only how hard and fast you are moving through water, and (2) unlike air which doesn't change, moving through water releases the phenomenon that as you travel faster through it, water's resistance increases, holding you back more. Water is 100 times denser than air, and doubling your speed through it causes resistance to increase by squared the effort producing four times the resistance. And this occurs only if you move through water correctly. Fight the water or use poor technique, and the resistance builds by cubed the effort, which presents as doubling the speed producing eight times the resistance. This is the reason that anyone not familiar or comfortable in the water flailing about for more than 10 seconds can experience a great degree of discomfort first respiratorily then muscularly.

Forcing the body's conditioning enzymes to produce more mitochondria in the vital tissues associated with vigorous exercise is the key to building any increase in the training effect; therefore, extending repeated efforts over distances to 300 yards or meters or holding the efforts for four to five minutes elicits the desired adaptive responses. This could prove quite daunting to the uninitiated and would drive away most attempting such training. The perceived feeling of being completely out of air in water can humble even the most determined.

What works initially is to break the distance or time interval down into segments that allow short but regular recovery periods. During these brief rest periods, it is more helpful for recovery to blow off (exhale forcefully) accumulated C02 than inhaling more air.

Progressing from Endurance to Strength

To train for strength, resistance in the water must be increased, yet time and distance need to be maintained. Using mechanical devises such as kick boards placed half-submerged facing upward like a "tombstone" doubles the resistance; placing it sideways half-submerged triples the resistance.

Expecting to move great amounts of water (resistance) with the kickboard over time and distance too quickly is asking for overwhelming fatigue to develop much too soon in the training session. Better to build into this by holding kicking speed to a slower steady rate so the time or distance can be negotiated successfully. Increasing resistance can be afforded by use of water-proof medicine balls and keeping them held out of the water while just kicking either in place in deep water or moving across the pool. This is harder than it sounds and much harder than it looks. But once the body adapts to this increased challenge, strength is increased in the legs and body core.

Arriving at the Promised Land: Power

As stated earlier, power is the goal of every athlete who yearns to move fast. Except for marathon-type events where endurance need is prominent, most everything else requires the development of powerful muscle groups. And these need to be "reminded of same" periodically by specific types of movement through water. Here, the time element comes strongly into play but only as a marker of movement over a shorter distance. The most covered distances are 25 yards in a short course competition pool, and 50 meters in an Olympic-sized pool. The best way to build power is to build the intensity of the swimming and/or kicking movements through the prescribed distance. It is also mandatory to allow much more recovery time between exercise bouts because we need to have adequate regeneration of ATP for maximum muscular contraction.

There are training sessions where we vary our kicking speeds throughout a prescribed distance to glean the benefits of all three types of training. Runners have used Fartlek (speed play) for years; this method of training is also used by my swimmers. We call it going from pace to push pace to race pace, recycling this throughout a prescribed distance or time interval. But most of the work to develop power is through a shorter distance over time; vigorous effort is key.

Training aids used to develop power include quality swim fins, rigid kick boards, medicine balls, and latex tubing. This last piece of equipment is used to secure the swimmer such that he can not move through the water once the tubing is stretched to its max. What we look for here is to prepare the body to handle the "cocoon effect" that is usually elicited. The mind needs movement when it senses physical exertion. If exhaustive efforts are performed but no movement is realized, a smothering or "cocooning effect" becomes prominent. To control this is to produce mental toughness which is the difference between thinking you can or thinking you can't.

The goal is power. It is a prolonged and challenging process to attain it. If things go well, the athlete will perform up to his potential. But we know how hard he has worked to make it all look so easy.

Coach Ed Nessel, a frequent contributor to the AMAA Journal, is the United States Masters Swimming (USMS) National Resource Librarian and active member of the Sports Medicine and Coaches Committees. He was selected USMS Coach of the Year in 1998 and was invited to coach at the Olympic Training Center in 2002.

By Edward H. Nessel, RPh, MS, MPH, PharmD