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The
Ultimate Recovery Workout The backstroke's power works on more than swimmers An obvious question that never seems to get asked: If hard-training athletes are forever being urged to use swimming as a recovery workout, what do hard-training swimmers use? Auburn University head swim coach Dave Marsh knows. And if his simple answer pinpoints one of the best recovery workouts you can do in the pool, perhaps it pinpoints one of the best recovery workouts for anyone. Marsh tells his top freestylers to turn over on their backs, following a hard training set in their main stroke. His reason sounds simple enough. "Swimming backstroke gives them a chance to work the kinks out of their tired freestyle muscles with some active rest swimming." But there are several big ideas embedded in that little prescription, all of which can work just as well for cross-trainers who want a quicker recovery from land-based workouts as they do for people who spend almost all their athletic time in the water anyway. Understandable that Marsh has given the subject some thought. Auburn's swimmers, currently ranked second in the NCAA, cover six to ten miles a day in training--a healthy load even for a runner, never mind the swimmer, whose body interprets it as the equivalent of a marathon or more six days a week. Add two to three weekly sessions in the weight room for good measure and it's obvious the team's recovery training had better be good. That's what the backstroke is, and not just for swimmers. The reason is that while freestyle and backstroke are both "long axis" strokes, meaning they share the same pattern of body rotation--and use many of the same muscles, they use them in slightly different ways. In both you lie prone in the water and rotate the hips around the spinal or long axis while stroking with an alternating arm pattern. Though you swim backstroke with many of the same musclesas freestyle, the movement is reversed, so easy backstroke swimmingcan "massage" tired freestyle muscles. The ones that werecontracting are now lengthening and vice versa. Besides, infreestyle, the simple act of breathing correctly is a technique andmany people tense up if they don't have it just right. Backstrokeis more relaxing for them because they can breathe any time theywant. On top of that, you get to loosen up and take the sessionwith something less than deadly seriousness. A slightly sloppystroke technique can be harmlessly brushed off a lot more easilythan it could in what most triathletes, swimmers and cross-trainersconsider their primary stroke. The idea is to use "non-prime"strokes for warming and loosening, as in a recovery workout, andsave your prime stroke for fast swimming with good form. And even if swimming is just a sport for your "off" days, youcan get a lot out of facing the ceiling instead of the pool bottom.If you're swimming to recover, you should know that backstroke,thanks to its natural loosening properties, may work even better asa general recovery stroke than freestyle. And if you're into moreserious water work, say training for a triathlon, open water orMasters swimming event, you undoubtedly swim mostly freestyle andcan use backstroke as a restorative just as Marsh's troops do. So why don't more people swim inverted if it's so great? 1. the disconcerting sense of being upside-down and going backwards, and, 2. difficulty in staying afloat. Both are easy to fix.
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