Competitive swim is a sport popularized from athletes that have participated in the Olympics over the course of recent and past years, enduring an impressive title by demonstrating the great lengths that the human body can persevere through in intense competition. Although it has the possibility of inspiration to witness, there is so much time, training, effort, and discipline that is applied to these athletes prior to even competing in these swift paced races.
Competition swimming is a sport no different than any other sport as far as effort, where the amount of effort that you input into your training and practice the more you would benefit, but how would a typical athlete train for their events? A key to a swimming athlete’s capabilities is their consistency, a continuous cycle of swimming, dryland, and recovery. Courses of a practice would typically appear as if they are only swimming back and forth in the swimming lanes in an Olympic size pool, but in reality everything they do is perfectly calculated to benefit them in their races such as swimming consecutively for a certain amount of distances completed within a certain time period, including competition swimming strokes such as freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly. If you were to pay close attention to a typical swimming athletes environment-besides their swim meets-they are always presented with a clock within close proximity of them. Other elements that a swimmer has to incorporate in their training would be titled “dryland”. Dryland would be all exercises and training outside of the pool, such as strength training, calisthenics, running and/or yoga.
A swimming athlete’s daily routine wouldn’t be abnormal to include a series of early morning routines, high caloric diets, and multiple swim practices throughout the day. Ironically, just like an early morning fishing time, swimmers wake up just as early to do continuous laps in the pool for a set amount of time (typically two hours) and again later on throughout the day once they feel rejuvenated. All this may seem tiring but that’s where the early sleep schedule comes in to restore exhausted muscle fibers and tissue in addition to their high caloric diets. A competitor swimmer can burn roughly ~700 calories an hour in practice and even more on top of that during all dryland activities. Their metabolism would be working to an extreme, not only due to the intensive exercise that they perform, but even more when they consume large portions of high quality food in between to restore and energize their bodies to maintain their physicality and physique.
The amount of discipline required to maintain a competitive swimmers schedule is not easy to build, but through repetition and practice, grueling morning routines, daily dryland activity, multiple hours of practice in the water, and eating enough food to restore the body, it is possible. All this repetition just to perform the very best that their mentality and physicality is capable of taking them in their races. Just like any sport, practice is everything, especially competitive swimming.