Workouts at the Pool

Pool workouts are a great way to cross-train. But what do you do during a “pool workout”? Much like land-based workouts at the gym, you can do practically whatever you’d like. Exercising in the pool can improve your endurance, your sprinting ability (from a cardiovascular standpoint), your sprint endurance, or even your muscular strength and tone.

Endurance Exercise

The simplest way to improve your cardiovascular endurance during a pool workout is to swim laps. However, one of the most difficult parts of switching to pool workouts for people who are not swimmers tends to be breathing. Swimming several laps in a row without stopping to catch your breath can be very challenging at first. So, when you have the natural impulse to stop swimming (because you feel like you’re going to die!), roll over onto your back and swim with your face out of the water instead of stopping altogether. This will keep your heart rate up during your workout. The most important part of doing an endurance workout is to elevate your heart rate for the duration of your workout. Stopping and starting during the workout makes this difficult, if not impossible.

You can do endurance exercise and resistance training at the same time. Simply structure your workout to avoid working the same groups of muscles in consecutive exercises. This allows you to move directly from one exercise to the next, keeping your heart rate up throughout the entire workout while still targeting specific muscle groups through resistance training. This concept is the basis of super-setting during strength training.

Sprints

Just like running sprints on a track or sprinting up hills, you can sprint in the pool. All you have to do is swim a short distance (one trip down the length of the pool or once down-and-back) as fast as you can with a rest interval between sprints.

“Sprint” training can also be accomplished by performing power activities like jumping. Jumping workouts in the pool may make you feel like a little kid splashing around, but they’re good (often difficult) workouts that aren’t as hard on your joints as jumping on dry land. Regardless of the activity, power exercises must be done quickly, otherwise, they are not technically power exercises from a fitness and physiology standpoint.

Intervals

For swimming-only interval workouts, just integrate a lap or half-lap of sprint speed swimming with continuous endurance-based swimming (you’re combining the first two categories of swimming workouts discussed above). If one swimming stroke causes you to breathe harder than another, you can try changing strokes to change your current heart rate. After you’ve been swimming your “standard” stroke style for a few minutes, do the harder stroke for a lap or two and then switch back to the original stroke.

For interval workouts that combine swimming and other activities, you can swim endurance laps and mix-in power activities every few minutes (jumping is the best for this).

Resistance Training

Resistance training in a pool is a great way to train “sprint endurance.” Since your body parts require less muscle force to move them in the water than they do on land, your muscles will be taxed more by doing exercises for an extended period of time rather than for a specific number of repetitions.

One way to improve the results you see from resistance training in a pool is to use the equipment specifically designed for pool exercising such as fins, webbed gloves, kickboards, Styrofoam dumbbells, and foam leg floatation devices. Some of these pieces of equipment may be available at your community pool for you to use. If you aren’t able to or don’t want to use any of these pieces of equipment, you can still strengthen and tone your muscles by doing practically any kind of movement in the water. Increasing the surface area of the moving body part (like opening your hand instead of making a fist) will increase the resistance of the water and the difficulty of the exercise.

Resistance Training in a pool can be achieved in a number of ways, such as:

• Swimming one length of the pool using just your arms (you can use the foam pieces/rolls to put between your legs to make them more buoyant to help keep you afloat)
• Swimming laps with webbed gloves on your hands
• Swimming laps with small fins
• Moving your arms in specific exercise patterns (like arm curls or arm raises) or doing activity-specific motions (like doing port de bras) while holding Styrofoam dumbbells or another water resistance aquacise tools
• Running in the pool, reversing directions every 30 seconds