Swimming

Nick Gillingham MBE is a double Olympic medallist swimmer, former World, European and Commonwealth Champion setting 3 World, 10 European, 9 Commonwealth and 17 British Records for his breaststroke events…so he knows a thing or two about swimming.

Following this successful swimming career, Nick is now involved in all levels of swimming coaching, from his very own swimming academy to working alongside government bodies. He offers detailed swimming coaching including swimming courses, swimming training plans, his swim academy, online resources and carefully selected solutions to help improve swimming technique, strength, endurance, speed and recovery…one of...

POWERbreathe attended this incredible event alongside Borut Strel, Martin Strel’s son. Martin, aka ‘Big River Man’ (he swam the Amazon River), is a Slovenian long-distance swimmer – and long-time POWERbreathe user! His son Borut operates Strel Swimming Adventures, and Duncan from POWERbreathe was delighted to team up alongside him at this extreme event.

It was the 5th UK Cold Water Championships with 600 swimmers from across the world braving the frosty 0.5C water temperature.

The event is held every two years at Tooting Bec Lido and is ‘a celebration of British masochism and funny hats’.  Full of enthusiastic and sometimes eccentric swimmers,...

The sport of swimming involves your head being submerged in water most of the time so it is important to gain the correct swimming balance.  The majority of swimmers put a lot of concentration, practice, focus and effort into improving their swimming style. However, if the basic breathing techniques are not being followed all this effort goes to waste and what happens is the swimming stroke will lose its smoothness. It is essential that anyone who swims professionally or swims to get fit follows the correct breathing techniques and exercises.  Initially at the beginning it may be challenging to focus on breathing and executing the swimming stroke, but with...

In his blog about endurance racing and sport psychology, Andy continues writing about his experience of using POWERbreathe in his training, in the run-up to Challenge Roth; a triathlon race in and around Roth, Germany.

In his latest blog Andy shares his feeling about how POWERbreathe inspiratory muscle training (IMT) may have helped with his swim training.

Here’s an extract from his blog:

“I would certainly suggest that there has been an improvement in my swimming that coincided with a focused regimen of inspiratory muscle training (IMT). After about 3 weeks of training I began to notice how:

One of the best forms of exercises to improve and maintain your fitness levels is swimming. However swimming requires good breathing techniques and an overall efficient lung function. Breathlessness and breathing difficulties occur in swimming at different stages in your life. Breathing problems also have different fitness and health implications that depend on your age and swimming ability.

So here is the science. Water is much denser than air which means your chest will be somewhat compressed. To overcome this you need to consciously exhale while under water. You may have a feeling of panic as you may feel...

This week has been by far the most progressive of all the weeks I've been training on the POWERbreathe, I have finally been able to up the resistance to 4! I'm sticking to between 3.5-4 depending on how tired I am after training as the Loughborough University swim squad pre season program is now under way! This means lots of cross training and can mean feeling out of you depth at times ( no pun intended) due to the varied methods in which we can train our bodies, this can be a whole mix of things such as circuits, pool based circuits, spinning, medicine ball sets, core sets and running, however unfortunately due to my...

This weeks training has gone well, my POWERbreathe work has come along strongly this week and I'm really feeling better for it. I feel a lot more in control of breathing in and out whilst under demand when I'm exercising, particularly for swimming. I've been doing a lot of pilates this week and again I'm feeling a lot more stable and in control of the areas of injury, this is due to the muscle groups required to stabilise the joints to prevent further injury have become a lot more engaged. This means that when the joint is put under a load or strain, the muscles are engaging at the correct time and place to enable the load to be...

This week I haven't managed to get in the pool unfortunately and so I've had to compensate my training with increasing other areas to continue the progression I've seen. Importantly keeping up the POWERbreathe training at resistance 3 is very important for fitness and breathing function. I find that with the increased resistances such as 3 and higher the body is under quite a lot of strain when trying to suck the air through the POWERbreathe device, but with good technique what I find happens is that multiple muscle groups are recruited to help the body to breathe, this is a natural response of the body as it knows that the same resistance spread...

Its been a good week for strength training this week, with a good session of 1.5 hours of intensive rock climbing at my local leisure centre with a frriend who was an experienced climber. As egos do, the competition got going, seeing who could climb a certain wall or part with the least number of moves, or time. We stuck to a new aspect of rock climbing thats growing in popularity lately called bouldering, which means to climb without harnesses or ropes.

Often the rock faces one climbs are not anywhere near as high as when rope climbing due to the fact that the risk increases and so its not safe to climb too high. At certain leisure...

This week has been a good overall training week, in that I managed to get in the pool and practise all the areas I wanted, with inuries permitting, and I also got into the gym a few times to work on strength development. I already feel so much stronger from all the Pilates classes, free weights and body weight exercises! The benefits I've seen in the pool are great so far, I'm noticing that I don't feel as strained or tense and so the injuries aren't playing up as much which is great. I've been trialing out under the recommendation of the POWERbreathe Guru using my Powerbreathe in my training, so have been taking it down to the...