Oh boy this again, swimming muscle building. I mean you would think doing 3 other articles in the last 3 weeks on this subject would be more than enough to educate and help those of you struggling with this question but alas I continue to get more and more requests directed about Swimming muscle building
So I plan to end it all here. I plan to go as in depth as I can on swimming muscle building.
First off when we look at Swimming muscle building we need to go over a few very important subjects. What causes you to build muscle mass?
Time under tension, what exactly is time under tension? Time under tension is best described as let’s say the bench press if you take 4 seconds to lower the bar down to your chest and 2 seconds to expand it up that would put the muscle under tension for a total of 6 seconds. Now if we do 2 reps it keeps it under tension for 12 seconds, 3 reps would be 18 etc. And you can see where I’m going here.
Now when speaking about swimming we also need to take in mind that to build muscle we need to recruit and activate as many muscle fibres as possible primarally the type 2 fast twitch fibres.
These are normally hit when we Yep you guessed right train in the 3 to 5 rep maximum range.
Again, Swimming will NOT Stimulate anyway near the required amount of muscle fibres or activate then to build muscle mass at any noticeable degree.
As I’ve said before Swimming is a wonderful sport and with a GOOD diet, will keep you in great shape and low body fat, but it is actually catabolic (Ie it eats muscle!!) It does NOT build muscle.
Swimming muscle building is a silly question, You know when I use swimming with my clients? When I get a really obese client who is so over weight that doing more traditional cardio exercises could be life threatening, and or we their mobility is so bad we need to work on their mobility to be able to do exercises safely and correctly.
There for I send them swimming for intense sessions, sometimes ive had clients drop 100lbs, (these are VERY obese clients) but as soon as we get them onto the weight training and correct cardio this is when the dramatic and great body composition changes actually happen.
Now on the other hand with Swimming muscle building when bulking or a client needs to come to me for muscle mass you know what we do? We take SWIMMING out of our training yep. Many bodybuilders, powerlifters, Olympic lifters etc. are not allowed to do swimming for this very reason it is too catabolic and demanding on the muscles.
So to answer the question out flat can Swimming muscle building exist? The answer is NO it does not.
