Pre-pool and warm up

Here are some ideas for a land warm up as given on the Swim England website. These can be done before training, meet warm ups and races to prepare to swim at your best.

Stage 1: Raise

Raise your core temperature and heart rate by doing 20-30 seconds of 3-5 of the following exercises:

• Skipping
• Jogging
• High knees
• Heel flicks
• Mountain climbers
• Lateral jumps
• Spiderman switches

Video demonstrations of the above exercises can be found here: Raise Demonstrations

Stage 2: Mobilise

Doing mobility exercises before you swim is important to reduce the chances of injury in your muscles and joints. Do 5-10 reps of 3-4 exercises from this list:

• Standing streamlines
• Wall/floor slides
• Internal and external shoulder rotation
• 4 point or hands on head thoracic rotation
• "Open the book"
• Hip flexor lunges
• Heel drops
• Supine internal and external rotation
• "Spidermans"
• Streamline squats

Remember that these are all dynamic stretches, so you will be moving some part of your body. Video demonstrations can be found here: Mobility Demonstrations and here: Advanced Mobility

Stage 3: Activate

You may also want to do some activation exercises to target specific muscles to get them moving. This means that when you hit the water in a race they aren't being used for the first time since warmup.

• Glute bridges
• Clams
• Cat/cow
• Dead bugs
• Banded standing rotation
• Shoulder "push ups"
• "Sword draws"

Swim England have a progression for activation exercises in 4 levels. More exercises and video demonstrations can be found here: Level 1   Level 2   Level 3   Level 4

All exercises listed above plus more and information about land warmups can be found here: https://www.swimming.org/sport/tag/warm-up-exercises-for-competitive-swimmers/