LESSONS LEARNED FROM SWIMMING: KEEP YOUR EYES ON YOUR LANE

My regular readers will know this spiel I’m about to lay out, but for those unaware: I grew up as a fat kid.  It was very recently I learned that I was set up for failure from the start, discovering that my mom followed the conventional 1980s parenting wisdom of putting cereal in my bottle at a young age so that I would fatten up and sleep through the night better, and then a steady “diet” of commercials targeted at children revealing all the latest inventions of Poptart flavors (smores is still my favorite), toaster strudels, Sunny D’Light and the coolest and latest toys in the cereal box (I’m still kind of gutted that’s not a thing anymore) had me totally primed to achieve “90s fat kid” status.  Because it’s worth appreciating that, even as “the fat kid”, I wasn’t nearly as obese as most kids are nowadays, and it’s also worth appreciating that I was “THE fat kid”: a testament to the fact that most kids back then WERE decently fit and being fat was the exception, compared to today where fat is effectively the default setting.  I was “husky”, rather than obese.  All this said, my parents were also involved in many interventions to attempt to rectify my fatness, and since we existed in an era where nutrition was, once again, something television told us to eat, we all believed in the “no pain/no gain” mantra that we had to EXERCISE the fat away.  So I was enrolled in MANY youth sports (again, a difference between my upbringing and what we observe in modern adolescence), to include t-ball, soccer, ice hockey, martial arts (which I eventually stuck with, but that’s not what today’s post is about), and, at one point: swimming.  My parents observed how swimmers had a “swimmers physique”, we had constantly heard that swimming was “the BEST exercise you can do” (a myth that is still out there), and we had access to a local high school pool/swim program at a relatively low cost.  I only lasted one season, competing in a handful of meets, and when I tried taking a swim course in undergrad as a means of getting some easy credits, I was referred to by my instructor as “negatively buoyant”, so much of the time spent swimming was wasted, but I DID walk away with at least ONE valuable piece of information: keep your eyes on YOUR lane!

 

Yeah, this is me in pretty much any pool

 

Anyone who HAS swam competitively in some capacity completely understands that phrase, but for those of you not in the know: when you swim in a meet against other swimmers, you’re each assigned a lane to swim in, marked off with a floating divider.  It’s similar to racing on a track, just, you know: in water.  You’ll all start at the start time, with a goal of completing the assigned swim distance the fastest among other swimmers.  BECAUSE you are among other swimmers, it’s tempting, while you are swimming, to look at the other lanes and see how the other swimmers are doing, in order to gauge where you are in the competition.  However, an interesting phenomenon occurs here: when a swimmer looks into the other lanes to check the competition, they slow down!  The body tends to follow the eyes, and when we start looking off center, we start moving off center.  AND, along with that, time spent trying to watch the competition is time NOT spent giving 100% of our effort into the act of swimming.  Heck, we observe this same situation with traffic accidents: rubberneckers will cause FURTHER traffic delays because they drive SLOWER when they’re trying to observe the traffic accident, even if they swear it’s just a “quick peek”.  A good swimmer keeps their eyes on their own lane.

 

 

Which is SUCH a valuable lesson in the realm of physical transformation, because SO many trainees keep trying to watch the other lane while they’re swimming, and all they end up doing is slowing down their own work at the time.  The classic example of this (which inspired this post) is the trainee that SAYS they’re engaged in a “muscle building” phase of training…but that they want to minimize fat gain.  Why?  Because they don’t want to spend much time in a cutting phase (to the point that many claim they want to NEVER enter one, which is patently absurd for reasons I’ve written about on many occasions and this is already going to run too long for me to bloviate on that today).  Here, the trainee is looking at the cutting lane of transformation WHILE they’re still in the muscle building lane.  And in doing so, they compromise their success in muscle building: the very thing they’re SUPPOSED to be accomplishing!  These trainees are so concerned with minimizing fat gain that they ALSO minimize muscle gain: trying to eat on the thinnest of margins and gain the absolute barest minimum of weight on a fixed, linear and predictable weekly pattern in order to ASSURE themselves that the weight they’re gaining is 100% pure muscle with no fat at all.  And then, if they actually DO enter that fat loss phase, it sure is a short one…because they gained NOTHING during that muscle building phase.  They managed to successfully accumulate water weight from the inflammation of training and some food mass in their gut from increased intake, but their body simply upped its non-exercise activity thermogenesis to match the paltry 100 calorie “surplus” they implemented and burned off everything with no discernable gain.

Yeah, he's fast, but he's gotta eat about a billion calories to STILL not be The Juggernaut

 

This trainee needed to LEAN IN to that muscle gain phase and give it the 100% full effort that wins swim meets.  Am I saying they need to go full Bruce Randall and get up to 400lbs bodyweight?  No: but it sure worked for Bruce.  I’m saying they need to enter a muscle gaining phase with an intent to GAIN MUSCLE.  “Overeating” should be the goal.  Seeing that scale tick up should be rewarding!  If we’re gaining fat, that ALSO means we’re gaining muscle: we’re SUCCEEDING!  And since we’re dedicating 100% of our efforts to muscle gaining, it means, when it comes time to cut away the fat, we can focus on THAT with 100% of our efforts and REALLY reveal something pretty awesome in the end. 

 

And training is no different here.  No one wants to employ periodization, because trainees want to watch EVERY lane at the same time.  The idea of letting the bench press numbers take a quick dive while we build up our conditioning is abhorrent to many trainees: it’s like blasphemy to them!  The idea of giving up a favorite pet lift in order to spend time prioritizing a weakness is unacceptable.  Training can never be phasic: we have to do all the things all the time…and, in turn, we get good at nothing all at once.  You watch every lane, you end up last.  Hell, even swimming figures this out: you don’t try to do every stroke all at once.  They have a medley for that!  A time for freestyle, a time for breast stroke, and a time for butterfly.

And those who figure that out can do pretty good for themselves 

 

When the whistle blows, dive into the water, take off like a shot, and keep your eyes on your lane.  You’ll get where you want to go much faster, and may even find a medal around your neck when you get there.