Swim Training For Martial Artists: Ultimate Guide

Many martial artists do swim training to get an advantage over other martial artists in terms of physical strength. Swimming has two main benefits for your health: muscle endurance and improved lung function and capacity. These two benefits help a lot in your martial arts training and in your professional fight. Let's explore the ways swim training can be beneficial for you if you are a martial artist. Even if you are not a martial artist, swim training can be very beneficial for you.

Swim training is a practice of developing many physical attributes, such as speed, strength, endurance, and recovery through swimming. Martial artists develop swimming skills to improve their performance and recovery in their game against opponents.

Martial artists are realizing the importance of swim training or swimming by seeing the benefits that other fighters get from training. So they start swimming. The following are the reasons and benefits martial artists are doing swim training:

• Swimming is considered a rare form of training that does not stress your legs, ankles, or feet because you are not touching the ground. You are in the water, and your legs are moving within the water. So there is no risk of injury, unlike other training forms. This does not mean that you should switch to swimming and leave all other training you do for martial arts. You can take advantage of swimming with a simple rule. Do swim training only when you are in your recovery days.

• Another thing which are triggering martial artists to do this training is that swimming does not overburden you. When you do a workout in a gym, you are lifting weights, for example. So you are stressing your hands, arms, and shoulders. This stress, if you put more on it, increases the risk of injury. So in a gym, there is always a higher risk of injury, no matter what you do. But in swimming, you are not stressing yourself, so there is no risk of injury, and you can do it anytime you want.

• Swimming is one of the few training forms in which your complete body is involved in training. Your whole body is moving at the same time. So you don't need to focus on each of your body parts separately. So it takes less time for a complete body workout in swimming than in other forms of training.

• Muscle endurance is another thing that makes every martial artist try to do swim training. If your muscle endurance improves, you can do your martial arts training for a long time. So both training forms complement each other. Muscle endurance is the maximum time your muscles can contract and exert force. It is also a very important pillar in your professional martial arts fighting match. You can improve your muscle endurance by just doing swim training or swimming.

• Swimming is probably the most daunting element of martial arts training. There are a lot more techniques and different things to consider, and it's not as easy as just heading straight out the front door. You have to get to a pool and work on technique. When you race, there is that hustle and bustle as well, which is really off-putting. But here are some great techniques discussed today. They are going to help you improve not only your swimming in the pool but also your swimming in open water. It is not just how strong, how fit, and how fast you are. It is how efficient you are.

• Technique is everything for swimming. You could be an Olympic champion runner, yet you can't swim 100 m without being crazy out of breath. So you need to work on things that are going to make you more efficient and therefore more comfortable, and more relaxed. It will help you swim quickly. Some of these drills are really specific to open water. A key thing that you should really like to work on is getting out of the water, feeling a lot fresher for the bike and the run leg. If you can get off feeling fitter and fresher, more efficient, then you can benefit from that.

• Swimming gets you to the bike, bike gets you to the run, and run gets you to the finishing line. It is all about efficiency. You are not going to swim minutes quicker in the swim, but if you can get out fresher, more relaxed, your transition will be smoother, and then you have more energy for the bike. You have so many matches. You should burn as little as possible in the swim. So efficiency is everything, and drills are the key to that.

The following are some benefits of doing swim training for martial artists:

• The first drill is called finger drag, and it's great for doing two things: working on a high elbow and not crossing the center line. Let's break it down. First of all, looking at the high elbow. So when we swim the recovery phase, which is when your hand is out of the water, going over your head, we want a nice high elbow to really exaggerate that. When we swim, the drill is you just drag your fingers along the top of the water until they go in, and then you do this with both arms.

• The second part of this drill really works on rotation. If we have a center line, or if you can imagine a pole down the middle, we don't want to cross like that. Because as we enter the water like that, you can see your right hip goes out, and then the left hip. That is like a crocodile, which is so inefficient. So it is very hard to see where your hand enters. So, as we finger drag, it stops us from crushing this center line. So we need to finger drag, and in there, this drill is really going to help efficiency. Use fins if you have them because then you don't have to focus on floating body position.

• With this drill, it's all about rotation. If you can imagine a pole through your body and you are rotating round a little like a rotisserie chicken, just perfectly going round. We need that rotation. That is the focus of this drill. We are going to do three strokes. So it is a one-stroke, two-stroke, and then as we come in, we rest our ear on our shoulder. Keep nice, and we are on our side, and it is six kicks, and then we go in one, two, three, and then we kick. This is really got the rotation, and it's really hard to do so. It might take you a few goes to get it right, but once you feel that feeling, the stroke lengthens, your distance per stroke improves, and it's making you an efficient swimmer.

• You should do it six times, doing half a length of the drill, but you need to always put it into freestyle. Because that is what we are doing, and afterwards put it into 100 m. So, with all the drills we have talked about so far, they have been about rotation and the front of our stroke. One of the biggest parts of the stroke that people neglect is the finish. It is the hand exit of the water. So this stroke is all about that.

• So we know we are going to have a nice high elbow. We are going in, we have got our rotation as we have got our catch and pull as you come out. People often just come out short. You can call it touching your trunks. It's got many names. It's entirely up to you, but basically, when your hand exits the water, you should try to brush the thigh and flick. So it really has to do that. When you are getting the water, you are catching your pull, and you have the high elbow underwater. You are pulling through, you are coming by. Keep it nice and straight and coming out there, and then again back to the high elbow.

• So when your hand is in the underwater phase, you are really moving that body. You are going in. Your hand doesn't actually move. It stays still, and you move, but we wanted to get the most bang for our buck there. So this drill again should be done 6 to 8 times, putting it into full stroke. This drill is probably one of the most neglected areas of the stroke that we need to improve on, but to really get the full power of the stroke, we need to work from top to bottom. As martial artists, you should be as efficient as possible. When we get out of that water, we need to be fresh and have swum fast. So we have got more energy for the bike and for the run.

• The third drill you need to do in swim training is sighting. Sighting is mostly beneficial in open water swimming. You should do a sighting because you should also be able to do open water swimming. While you are swimming, you are mostly confused and nervous because there will be people around you bashing and shouting. You don't really know which direction you are going and which direction you need to go. So, for perfecting you in that sense, you should add a sighting drill to your training.

• The basic objective behind sighting is that you are practicing to swim in the direction you want to go. Sighting improves your direction. You should first start the sighting drill, not in open water, because it will be very difficult for you. You need to go into a pool to do this drill.

• For doing this drill, you need to keep your head underwater and swim normally. After 8-10 strokes, put your head out of the water and then put your head back into the water. Besides this, after each five strokes, you should look up. These two things, i.e., looking up and getting your head out of the water, are the basics of sighting. This will make your direction of swimming perfect in the way you want it to.

The fourth drill is the clenched fist. The purpose of doing this drill is to it will improve your movement and stroke power, ultimately improving your swimming. There are two types of clenched fists. You can make a full fist or make it half like a claw. Both are effective and beneficial. You can choose anyone. The way to do the clenched fist drill is that one stroke you make into water from both your hands should be with your normal hands or with your full length, and the next stroke you make should be with your clenched fists. Always remember that you should be doing this drill with both your hands. Doing this drill, you will definitely feel improvement in your swimming and hand power.

• The last drill we will discuss is the hypoxic swimming drill. This drill improves your breathing during swimming. This translates to your martial arts also. One of the most important aspects of any physical activity, such as exercise, a workout, or a fight, is breathing. If you can master your breathing, then you can win easily. The way to do hypoxic swimming is to increase the number of strokes between each breathing interval.

• This will improve your breathing and your ability to swim or fight longer. So, for example, you should increase the duration between each breath until you master the previous duration. In the first lap of your swimming in the pool, make three strokes and then breathe. Continue doing this again and again until you complete the lap.

• Now, in the second lap, you will not breathe after three strokes. Instead, you will do five strokes and then breathe and repeat this pattern until you complete the lap. In the same way, you will breathe after each seven strokes. So you should repeat these patterns, and this will improve your breathing to a major extent. This will give you many benefits in your martial arts fight as well.

Swim training has a lot of benefits for martial artists. If you are just starting in any martial art, no matter what it is, you should start adding swim training to your daily routine. The best way, as discussed before, is to do swim training when you are on your recovery days because getting tired or injured is a common thing in martial arts training. But this is very important to do because it has a lot of impact on how you fight against your opponent. It gives you all the skills you need to dominate against your opponent, such as mental and physical strength, increased lung capacity, improved stamina, and breathing efficiency and capacity.

Swimming is very important to do if you are a martial artist because it has a lot of impact on how you fight against your opponent. It gives you all the skills you need to dominate against your opponent, such as mental and physical strength, increased lung capacity, improved stamina, and breathing efficiency and capacity.

There are a lot of swim training drills that are very beneficial for martial artists, but the following are the best ones:

• Finger Drag

• Rotation

• Sighting

• Clenched Fist

• Hypoxic Swimming

Swim training is a practice of developing many physical attributes, such as speed, strength, endurance, and recovery through swimming. Martial artists develop swimming skills to improve their performance and recovery in their game against opponents.