For the past few months, SwimSwam has been posting a daily swimming workout to help inspire swim coaches around the world who are looking for new ideas to try with their swimmers. Since most of the world’s pools are currently closed for business, we wanted to give swimmers and coaches an alternative set of dryland workouts to use to stay fit during the quarantine. These workouts will be designed to be done around the house. Some will use basic equipment, like medicine balls or stretch cords, while others will be all body-weight exercises.
These workouts are provided for informational purposes only.
See more at-home training ideas on our At Home Swim Training page here
Chest and Back
One of the biggest challenges of at-home workouts is finding ways to increase the challenge. In a traditional gym setting, you can just pick up a bigger dumbbell or a heavier rope or add an extra plate to the bar. At home, unless you’re fortunate enough to have a full weight set in your garage or basement, it’s not that easy. Adding more reps is beneficial to a point, but doing 150 pushups isn’t going to make you that much faster than doing 130 pushups.
If you’re like the rest of us, you’re approaching your 7th week of working out at home. This exercise will include some variations on traditional work that helps increase the load on your bodyweight workout.
Warmup
Focus on your upper body with this warmup. Here’s a good one if you don’t already have one:
Main Set
The key here is the ‘difference’ in the exercises. If you find that you’re maxed out on the variation, jump back to just the standard versions of the pushups to complete the set.
The one-arm pushups aren’t true one arm pushups, they’re pushups with one arm on an elevated surface, about 5-8 inches. A textbook is a good starting point, 2 textbooks is better. This is a good intermediary pushup if you’re working toward a one arm pushup.
Many of these exercises are described here.
:30 rest between each exercise, unless noted
- 5 x pushups
- 5 x left-arm-dominant pushups (right arm on the ground, left arm on a box
- 5 x right-arm-dominant pushups (left arm on the ground, right arm on a box)
- :30 seconds superman (on your chest, arms and legs off the floor, squeeze your glutes and lower back)
- :30 seconds superman
- 5 x pushups
- 10 x T pushup (regular pushup, rotate to one side and raise your arm straight up along with it)
- 15 x Pullup Superman (on your stomach, squeeze glutes and lower backs to raise chest off the floor. Mimic a pullup motion by extending arms then squeeing your back to pull them back to your chest.
- 15 x Dead stop to Superman (Start in a pushup position, slowly lower your chest to the ground, then extend out into superman position and back to pushup, then push up)
- 5 x wide grip pushup
- 10 x elevated pushup (works your lower chest)
Cardio
Get some cardio in after the above workout, 10-15 minutes is sufficient. Go for a run if you can, if not here’s a simple at home cardio workout.
5x through:
- 10 burpees
- 20 jumping jacks
- :60 seconds shadow boxing (use your feet)
Cooldown
Good static stretch to cool down.