Favorite Dryland Exercise Thread
MoCo
Worcester, MASenior Member
Since many of us are going through pool withdrawal right now, I thought it might be nice to if we all posted our favorite dryland exercises to share ideas.
I'll start:
Favorite non-swim cardio: hiking, probably, but I'll mostly be treadmill running for the duration since we have one in our house.
Favorite strength exercise: The KB arm bar! So great to keep shoulders strong and healthy! https://www.strongfirst.com/arm-bar-day/ If your shoulders are wonky, use caution on this one. My trainer started me with just laying on my side and holding a KB in the air until I could do that w/out the wobbles. That took an embarrassingly long time.
Comments
Love it.
Favorite non-swim cardio: my road bike on my trainer (I'm too scared to ride on the roads in Massachusetts)
Favorite strength exercise: I'm in the market, tbh. My strength training has usually just been shoulder stretch band stuff I learned in PT. Back in the day I loved me some TRX, but i don't have access to that torture equipment at the moment.
My husband has a travel version of the TRX - I think it was about $100 maybe. It hooks over a door top.
Medicine ball, Jump rope, rowing machine
My sister bought me an 80# punching bag a few years ago and some of those battle ropes. Both give the feeling of keeping the shoulders strong. Hiking will be on the menu soon.
<))><
Burpees. ALL THE BURPEES.
this is where my procrastination bites me, the broken treadmill has needed a new belt since last March, but then it was spring and open water and then a mild winter so I could get to the gym. Now the new treadmill belt is in the mail, should arrive tomorrow and the exercise bike is also scheduled for tomorrow.
So plan is treadmill, stretch bands and exercise bike and dog walks.
Running (that's still allowed outdoors where I live), TRX (inexpensive substitute), medicine ball (some lifts plus pound it down on the floor when downstairs neighbors get too noisy),
power walking, body weight exercises like plank, squats.
Today is the day I realized that I typically swim further than I walk on any given day. I'm not really enjoying my time stuck on dry land. Lake is still too cold for me. It looked really nice yesterday as I walked down the beach. I guess we are just going to have to deal with this dry spell...
Concept 2ski erg
I used one of these at the gym a few months ago - seems like there'd be a ton of crossover with swim muscles, and it's great cardio (and great fun).
It's warming up enough to start using my kayak on the local "lake". I hope i can mix it up with endurance and sprint training to at least keep the back muscles strong.
I have a training bench from Lane Gainer called the Halo system. It uses a template and stretch cords to train for correct hand, elbow and shoulder position. It’s a great workout. They are currently running a promotion of 19% off.
Here’s a link to the promo - https://bit.ly/2vBMrRm
Looks like this -
You also need this code for the discount -
HaloSwim19%off
I don't do dryland. If unfortunately even the OW is no longer an option in addition to pool closure, I will stop torturing myself.
A couple thoughts as we continue to be like fish out of water. Note that this is more for pool swimmers waiting for warmer weather. If you can swim outside already, then I'm jealous. Anyway...
This is an opportunity to give our muscles and joints some rest and care. Especially for us a little further along on the age timeline. I'm just doing some light weight stuff like wall sitting and usual calisthenics, but nothing vigorous. Keeping loose and taking walks. So I'm in shutdown mode at the moment.
I have had times in my life where I've had an enforced period of no swimming. This could be due to work schedule, injury or just life happening. I now accept that it is downtime and treat it as a mild inconvenience. I know I'll be back in the water sometime, so it's not the end of the world. Plus, it's a time for rest and rebuilding of broken pieces, so enjoy the moment.
Because of these sporadic downtimes, I've got a pretty good routine for starting back up. If I've learned nothing else in my dumb life, I've learned the value of patience. Nothing lasts forever, and that includes the startup period when I first get back in the swim of things. So for the first week I just swim 100's. One rule. Do not look at the pace clock. Send off is when I feel like swimming the next 100. Swim for about an hour or so or until you are tired of swimming stupid 100's. It's dumb and boring, but I've found that it is the best way to ease into workouts again without getting overexcited and wanting to blast out killer workouts immediately.
The following week, start increasing set distances. So for example, do some easy 100's for warm up, then knock off some 200's and see how that feels. As the week progresses, keep building up the set distances, so maybe by Friday you're doing 500's and feeling pretty happy about it. Again, the only rule is don't look at the pace clock. This is the week that you start paying attention more to your technique and how it's holding up as you increase distances.
Week after that is when you are first allowed to look at the pace clock. At this point, you should be able to do some half decent sets on modest intervals. Don't go doing sets thinking that you will be cranking just like when you last were swimming because it will only end in frustration and tears. This dry land detention could be months at this rate. My current rule of thumb is for every day out, it takes two days of swimming to get back. So give yourself time. The last thing you want to do is to injure yourself trying to get back in swimming shape. (Don't ask me how I know this...) When I was younger the out of shape to in shape ratio was better, so YMMV.
Be patient, life is long and my game plan is to be that old wrinkled 90 year old that everyone cheers for as I finish some unimportant swim. First in age group! Yeah!
So with not being able to swim, I’ve been incorporating an at home routine of jumping rope and intervals of body weight exercises - burpees, push ups, pull ups, sit ups and other core exercises, lunges, squats, planks, etc.
I feel like I did not do as much of the strength stuff as I should have when I was swimming so I’m treating this like the kick in the butt to start it now.
The plan is to continue doing the strength exercises even after I start swimming again. Who knows . . . Perhaps I will be better off than before!
I don't know whether this should go in this thread or the books I've read thread. I'll start with this link that my wife sent me. Some nice ideas if you don't already do this kind of thing. And for the record, I looked up Arlette Godges, the subject of the article, and she is pretty gosh darned solid. I saw her arms and shoulders and figured she was some sort of sprinter or butterflyer and I was not wrong.
The other item is actually a book that I just finished. Living with a SEAL by Jesse Itzler. Jesse had a Navy SEAL live with him and train him for a month. It's a pretty lightweight read, but it's really funny and some of the stuff they do is just crazy, so we can all relate. I actually burst out laughing at some of the insanity. The SEAL that he lived and worked out with is also fairly notable as the "toughest man alive", David Coggins. Reading about some of his achievements is utterly amazing.
OMG....I read that book too! I agree....some really funny stuff. And pretty hard core. Although, things were modified a bit....I had a take away, though, that that sort of lifestyle isn't necessarily sustainable for the "average joe" unless there is a significant amount of support. Now, I think I want to read it again, though.
@Sara_Wolf One of the things that they did in that book that has got me to thinking was the initial approach to training. My standard way of starting a training regimen is to kind of ease into it and build. The SEAL started things out pretty intense from the get go. And then escalated from there. When I was younger, I know I had coaches that used that approach. Now that I'm my own coach, I don't like to put myself through the intense start up, so I ease into it and I've convinced myself that this is the best way to avoid injury.
My current pondering is how to approach getting back into the water once things open up again. As I've stated above, my traditional start up is pretty measured and gradual. But I'm toying with the idea of dialing things up a bit more. The other aspect of this is that I'm guessing my first swims will be open water rather than pool, so I won't have my measured distances and intervals.
My first thought has been to swim as far as I can go on the way out. Then hold onto the boat and take a rest. Then swim all the way back. Do that for a week or two and I should be in pretty good swimming shape. But it feels pretty unstructured and I'm not sure it's the best way to progress rapidly. So I'm open to suggestions as to a great way to do start up in an open water environment.
Oh also, while I'm thinking of it... I hate burpees. Just did a couple sets in my calisthenics circuit and I hate them as much as I hate breast stroke...
@curly
If it were me....Rather than go as far out as you can, then turn back.....
I’d identify a target time..... then go out half that time, then return. That way, if you overestimated, you’re on the way back already. And, if you feel super fresh, you can do another out and back, or circle.
@curly my general return-to-OWS-after-excessive-slacking involves swimming boring back and forths in a cove in a local lake so I'm never more than about 25 yards from shore. Once I can comfortably swim both directions without feeling like I need a break (about a mile), I have a much better idea of my endurance and go on longer expeditions.
Life is weird. My new dryland exercise is something I hadn't envisioned. It seems as though a 90 foot tall hemlock died in my back yard. And this past winter a 120 foot hemlock finally fell over. So I had a tree company come in and cut the dead tree down and haul the other huge tree in big logs up to a place where I can work on them. They cut them into wood stove length. And the rest is up to me.
My original plan was to rent a log splitter and go to town. However, I live on a mountain and the terrain is a little sketchy for taking a log splitter down and back up. I'm pretty sure I could get it down to where the wood is, but I'm also pretty sure that it would stay there until it rusted back into the soil. When my neighbor built his house, they found an old logging truck frame back on his property, so I'm just sayin....
So I had to go to plan B. I have an axe, a sledge hammer and some wedges and apparently a lot of time. They say that firewood heats you a couple of times. Cutting it, splitting it, hauling it and finally tossing it in the old wood stove. I'm going to crank the house to 84˚ all winter.
Wow you're going to be a fit beast, Curly! Be careful, though.
@flystorms Oh I don't know about that. Believe it or not, splitting wood isn't all Paul Bunyan axe swinging. Like so many things, it's more about technique. I think the hardest part is going to be getting my loyal kayaker to haul all the wood up the hill. Pretty much convinced I'm doomed to do it myself...
Here's a pic of some of the wood. Those rounds are about 18" across, so when you bust up one, you've got a pretty good load of wood. It's nice back in our woods in the morning. It will be kind of misty some days. One of my neighbors is a flutist in the symphony. So on some mornings you can hear her practicing and flute music comes wafting through the mist. Kind of makes busting up wood rather meditative. But I'd rather be swimming...
Wow, yes, you're going to be quite toasty this winter with all that work.
There's some thing meditative about yardwork that can soothe the soul and open the mind. The sound of the flutist along with it is so epic.
Sometimes I refer to gardening as my “other sport”... I’m sure it’s easier than splitting fire wood, but digging, weeding and bending over/standing up a bazillion times gets me super sore!
I had a similar problem at my parent's house 15 years ago (to a more modest extent, as according to the pic your backyard is actually a jungle, for Spanish standards!). They had had an oak taken down, and I was having a really rough time for personal reasons; so I bought a very big axe, and spent 1 week chopping it to pieces. I don't know if my fitness improved, but man, that felt good!
dieciseisgrados.com/