Does swimming really help your running fitness improve after an injury? Well, that is a great question and that is what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
Today I was on a call with an active athlete who is recovering from a couple of different injuries and her main goal is to get back to running at high intensity. She is an elite runner, she is a fast runner, and she is trying to get better as quickly as possible. But while she has been injured and she cannot really run, what she has been doing is cycling, swimming, and doing a number of different strength training workouts to supplement her running fitness.
I think that is a great idea. But she asked me an interesting question and she wanted to know whether or not swimming was really helpful in terms of her cardiovascular fitness more than just her specific running related strength. My answer to her was really simple, I said “Look if you are a good swimmer, if you have good form, and you actually do efficient flip turns and all that kind of stuff, then yeah, it probably really does help maintain your cardiovascular fitness.”
However, if you are a mediocre swimmer like me, then it’s probably not really helpful for your cardiovascular fitness. Because I did Ironman triathlons for about 10 years. I did 15 of them, I did the Ironman World Championships, I was an Ironman World Athlete, and so you would think that somebody who made it to the Ironman World Championships would be a really great swimmer. Not necessarily so. The whole thing is 140.6 miles and only 2.4 miles of it is swimming and I figured out that if I didn’t swim at all, my swim time only got about 5 minutes longer on average.
So, I did a whole bunch of Ironman races where I literally didn’t even train at all because I was spending 6 hours a week training and it wasn’t really helping my Ironman times and that is all I cared about. However, when you swim, if you swim with good form, even if you swim with bad form, it helps your overall fitness because I believe it helps you maintain upright posture better.
I think that it does help you cardiovascularly if you swim hard. I think that upright posture and maintaining efficient form is super important. The swimming, I think, because the way you elongate your arms and the way that you reach and pull, and twist really does help your core strength in a way that will support your running fitness. It just depends on how hard you really swim in order to see if it’s really going to help your cardiovascular fitness.
Every single runner who calls me for a consultation, they’re frustrated, they’re demoralized, they’re anxious because they can’t exercise as much as they want to as when they were running and that is always the case. So, one of the biggest challenges and one of the biggest ways I can help runners is to help them understand that if you can’t run, you have to do something and being able to spend some more time swimming, actually working out and making it feel like you are actually getting exercise of some variety will always help your morale.
I really believe that deflated runners, crushed emotionally runners are more at risk of taking longer to get better because we know that it does bad things to you biochemically if you start to get depressed and anxious because you are not exercising. And in that way also I think swimming can be super helpful to getting you back to running a whole lot faster after your injury has healed even if it’s not directly maintaining your running fitness.
Hopefully you found this episode helpful and if you did, please like it, please subscribe, please share this channel with a runner who needs to hear it, and I’ll see you in the next training.
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