"You've never worked out in a gym before, with weights, have you?" Bryan said to James as they were walking down the school hallway.
"No, I haven't" Jimmy replied.
"Well, there will be a few things that will be all new to you then" Bryan smiled as he said that.
"What will the routine be?" said Jimmy.
"Well," Bryan said, "There are two parts to swimming fast. The two parts are conditioning and strength. It used to be that swimming was the sport that guys who knew they were not big enough or strong enough to play high school football, and certainly not tall enough to be really good at basketball. But a lot of that has changed."
"What do you mean?" responded Jimmy.
Bryan said."Look at all of those really successful swimmers you admire so much. They are obviously well-conditioned athletes in all sorts of ways. But the really good ones, the ones that end up as national champions and olympic hopefuls, have strong bodies, really strong. Take Michael Phelps: he has a huge chest and big arms too."
"Didn't he get that way just swimming in a pool a lot?" Jimmy responded.
"I suppose to a certain degree, but equally important is that his training invoved spending lots of time out of the water, in the gym, lifting weights and using other strength and conditioning equipent on dry land not in the pool." Coach thinks how we spend our time in the gym is at least as important for our swim times as our time in the pool." Bryan said'
"So, how is this going to work for us?"
"Well, you know that we have gym time scheduled early in the moring every day. There is all sorts of equipment to learn how to use. A lot of it involves weights and is used to build strength. But there is conditioning equipment you can use too. We have our first gym time scheduled Monday morning. One of the senior swimmers, Chad, works as a student assistant with the coach, and he will be meeting with us Monday morning to show us how to use each of the pieces of gym equipment.You can injure yourself pretty easily if you don't know what you are doing, so learning how to use the equipment right is in part ways to avoid hurting yourself and setting yourself back' said Bryan.
"But I thought that the way you built muscles was to make them hurt, to intentionally injure yourself?"
"Yes, that is true, to a certain degree, but you need to be able to tell a good hurt from a bad hurt. A sore muscle recovers quickly, a pulled tendon might take a while to heal, and that will not be good for your swimming at all. You need to know when your training is working and when you are on the verge of injuring yourself and setting your training backwards not forwards."
"I see. I have one more stupid question. What do I wear for gym?"
Well a lot of the guys like compression tees and shorts, the reason being these provide support and make muscles and tendons less prone to injury when you are working out. But you also need extra support in your groin area. Some of the guys wear one of their racing briefs under a pair of compression shorts, and then maybe a pair of looser fitting shorts over all of that. There is, of course, another option to wearing your swimsuit in the morning."
"What's that?" said Jimmy.
"Well, a few of the guys still like to wear a real athletic supporter, a jock strap, when they work out in the gym. They claim it supports their private parts better than a swimming brief" Bryan responded.
Jimmy said "I see, I've never worn one of those."
"Well, that's certainly an option for you to try. It might not work for you, but you should at least keep it open as a possibility." ....
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