Chapter 10: Exercising Outdoors 157
your legs a better workout. If you’re a beginning swimmer, you may feel
like you’re going nowhere, and you may have trouble moving fast enough to
get your heart rate up.
You can use fins when you kick with a kickboard,a foam board that helps you
stay afloat. But don’t use fins so much that they become a crutch. As you get
in better shape, you may want to switch from long swim fins to short fins,
which make you work a lot harder. Don’t swim with scuba fins; they’re too big
and too stiff.
Swimming with plastic paddles on your hands gives your upper body an
extra challenge. Some paddles are flat and rectangular; others are shaped
more like your hand, with a comfortable contour in the palm area. With both
styles, you place your hand on top of the paddles and slip your fingers through
a thick rubber band that secures your hand to the paddles. Paddles can help
you perfect your stroke technique and increase the intensity of your workout,
but use them sparingly; overuse can lead to shoulder injuries. When you swim
with paddles, put a pull-buoy(a foam gadget) between your thighs. This keeps
your legs buoyant so that you can concentrate on paddling rather than kicking.
Swimming the right way ...................................................................
You’ll probably spend the bulk of your workouts doing the front crawl, also
called freestyle.It’s generally faster than the other strokes, so you can cover
more distance. Don’t cut your strokes short; reach out as far as you can, have
your hand enter thumb-first so it slices the water like a knife, and pull all the
way through the water so your hand brushes your thigh. Use an S-shaped
sculling movement, where you hand moves out, then in, then out again across
your body/thigh and out of the water. Elongate your stroke so that you take
fewer than 25 strokes in a 25-yard pool. The fewer strokes, the better. Top
swimmers get so much power from each stroke that they take just 11 to 14
strokes per length of a 25-yard pool.
Kick up and down from your hips, not your knees. Don’t kick too deeply or
allow your feet to break the water’s surface. Proper kicking causes the water
to “boil” rather than splash.
Breathe through your mouth every two strokes, or every three strokes if you
want to alternate the side that you breathe on. You need as much oxygen as
you can get. Beginners sometimes make the mistake of taking six or eight
strokes before breathing, which wears them out quickly. To breathe, roll your
entire body to the side until your mouth and nose come out of the water —
imagine that your entire body is on a skewer and must rotate together. Don’t
lift your head out of the water to breathe — you’ll spend a lot of energy doing
that, and it’ll slow you down in the water.