For the past few months, SwimSwam has been posting a daily swimming workout to help inspire swim coaches around the world who are looking for new ideas to try with their swimmers. Since most of the world’s pools are currently closed for business, we wanted to give swimmers and coaches an alternative set of dryland workouts to use to stay fit during the quarantine. These workouts will be designed to be done around the house. Some will use basic equipment, like medicine balls or stretch cords, while others will be all body-weight exercises.
These workouts are provided for informational purposes only.
See more at-home training ideas on our At Home Swim Training page here
Weighted Backpack
The cancellation of most of the world’s in-person schooling has left many backpacks alone and deserted. With nowhere to transport books and papers and supplies to, there is little need for a backpack. But, now you can put your backpack back to use as part of your workout!
Note: these exercises work best on backpacks with hip and chest straps. If your backpack doesn’t have these, some of these exercises can still be done, but be careful – on some of the lateral exercises, if your backpack slides off your back, it could cause injury. Make all straps tight to distribute weight off your back. As always, when beginning new forms of adding weight to your exercises, don’t add too much too early. Use lower weights to build your form and you can up your weight later.
Warmup
- Straight forward: starting with your neck and moving down to your ankles, move all joints 20 times in each direction. For ball and socket joints like shoulders, ankles, and hips, do rotational movements. For hinge joints, like elbows and knees, make controlled flexing and extension movements.
Main Set
Rest 30 seconds between exercises
3x through each exercise before moving to next exercise
- Weighted plank – MAX, at least 20 seconds
- Bear hug squat (hug your backpack, do a body weight squat) – 10x
- Walking lunge – 20x (keep your shoulders back)
- Backpack rows (see here) – 10x
- Shucking (see here) – 10x in each direction
Second Set
- For the second set, go on a 10-minute walk or jog, depending on how much running you do generally, while wearing a weighted backpack. Focus on keeping good “stacked” posture (head over shoulders over hips over knees) throughout your walk/jog.
Cool Down
- If you are plagued by swimmer’s shoulder, which is the forward roll swimmers can get when doing too much ‘on their stomach’ swimming and not enough ‘on their back’ swimming, your shoulders might be a little sore after wearing a weighted backpack for this long. This scapular mobility progression will help.
