Why is Swimming so Hard?
Swimming just like many other sports is very hard and time intensive. A lot of people don’t realize how hard swimming is or think it’s not really a hard sport. I’m here to tell those people they are wrong and it’s quite the opposite. It can be one of the hardest sports. It is a constant year round and to be good you have to be at your peak condition. In most sports you catch a cold you can still play at your best or almost your best, but with swimming you get a cold and there goes that meet for best times in most cases swimming can be a very unforgiving sport. You don’t get a lot of opportunities to prove yourself so when something comes up that is your main focus to stay healthy and eat well and practice good until it happens.
For one the amount of time swimmers put into the pool is almost crazy. When you get up to higher levels you will have two a days during the school year not just the summer, that means you're up at four o'clock getting ready for practice and after practice you go straight to school so that you’re not late, and then right after school you go right back to the pool for your next practice of that day. Those are some long days for swimmers and all they want to do is sleep but you have too much to do if you sleep instead of practice you're losing opportunities to get better and improve. Each week during the school year a swimmer who’s on a club team is usually in the water for twenty hours, during the summer it only gets longer. Also swimming on a club is year round so unlike a lot of sports that are seasonal we don’t get a break. If a swimmer misses a week of practice due to injury or sickness they are so far behind and out of shape compared to other swimmers it’s rare to see a swimmer gone for longer than a day as to get far behind but with most other sports missing a week or a day won’t affect you that much compared to other people on your team.
Also swimmers work very hard to get there goals, swimming is a very hard thing to do as a sport being that humans just aren’t meant for water.I’ve read many articles from usa swimming about how humans aren’t made for water it’s very efficient to move through rather than on top of it. Each practice during a season is normally around eight thousand yards in two hours. You may not think eight thousand yards is that much in land terms but in the pool that it almost constant swimming even for olympians.If you go out and run for eight thousand yards that’s like a five mile run while to people who work out a lot is not to far, but in a pool that’s actually quite a bit. Unlike a lot of other mainly cardio sports they don’t help build muscle in other parts of your body besides the legs but in swimming you are using every muscles in your body the entire time and it can be very straining to due at times.In track or cross country which are cardio sports like swimming you don’t see those people with beef arms or all the jazz. After a two hour practice your coach depending on your level of swimming will have you go do what we call dry land. Basically just working out like most people do, we do a lot of abs/sit-ups but also lift weights and do pull-ups and pushups .If that’s not enough most swimmers who are at very high levels that compete in other states and will be going to a collage for swimming will go to a gym and lift weights on their own to help improve upon their own swimming career in the free time.
To go far in swimming you must be very committed to the sport and your team. Swimming takes a lot of hard work and it is always worth the work but to get the point of where it’s worth it you must always give the sport you're all. Just this past summer my team got a new swimmer Antony, he joined in the middle of the summer meaning we are at the peak of our practices and are working the hardest we will that summer. He had only done high schools swimming but was obviously meant to be a good swimmer,he was one of the best on his team and showed a love for the sport so he tried our club team. Throughout the summer he had almost just given up many times because he was tired or sore and just didn’t want to keep doing hard work when it was summer. But we all helped him through it, past the wall, once you're past this hard wall swimming as hard as we do just becomes second nature to you and you can swim insanely hard practices and be almost unfazed by it, you just have to break yourself into the routine and realize deep down if swimming at this level is meant for yourself or if you need to quit if you push through you are a swimming and you're committed to swimming to your team which basically becomes your family or you give it up.
This from swimswam.com it has a top ten of things non swimmers will never understand about swimming .It has some very interesting things on it. It talks about how swimmers will complain about the sport but we won’t ever quit it,and if a non swimmer talks bad about swimming swimmers are about to get into a fight.A sight I was looking at talked about how swimmers don’t get much pain and the sport can’t cause pain being it in water and not physical. But that is dead wrong swimmers get over use injuries very often.The muscles in our body can’t keep up with how much practice time we do so then a muscle starts to fail you.Also meets are very tough most other sports are a one day thing for a couple hours, but with swimming you can have up to five day meets for six hours each day.That’s a long time for just one competition you are in.Back to the pain piece,during a event your swimming your muscles are being used the entire time,if you're in the fifty free then in all out but in the mile you have to know how to use the right amount of power at certain times so that you don’t die out by the end of the race.
All this evidence is mostly taken from my own personal experience as being a swimmer myself,but I have also read many things online from sites and I have many swim magazines that all helped me with evidence and some things I found online I have contradicted here .When you're watching the olympics soon and you swimming don’t think oh it’s that weak sport think back to this,and remember just how hard swimming really is. Just remember swimming is actually one of the hardest sports there is because right now on sportology it’s ranked as the second most hard sport and I have seen many articles where it’s placed always in the top ten.Swimming is very difficult just keep it in mind.
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