Swimming and Lifting

I have been swimming a lot lately. Thanks to my coach Okie Dennis Berry, I started to think about swimming as a great active recovery workout. There is a huge similarity between lifting and swimming. In Olympic lifting, you significantly improve when your body is positioned correctly and the bar is traveling in the most efficient trajectory. Swimming is no different. Our body replaces the bar (our body is the load we are moving), and the “bar path” is typically our hand trajectory. But swimming has an added component. We swim in water, in horizontal position. The closer we can keep the body to horizontal, the more we minimize drag, which in turns means less energy required to move the weight load over distance.