Resistance Swimming Fully Clothed

In this lesson you'll learn how heavy wet clothes really get and how that affects your swimming skills. Bad swimming skills don't always show until clothes put up some resistance and you slow right down. Only correct swimming skills will keep you going.

Weigh and Measure

This initial experiment will show you how clothes affect your movements and weight in the water. Although your clothes won't pull you down, they will resist your movements and give you a hard workout.
1. First weigh yourself without any clothes on. Write it down. Then get fully dressed in jeans or sweatpants, T-shirt, a hooded sweatshirt, and possibly a pair of lightweight sports shoes and socks. The difference in weight with clothes on should be 2 or 3 kg. Write it down.

2. Now hop into the water. Make sure you get everything fully soaked so we can check the weight difference. Cotton garments soak up a lot of water.

3. As soon as you come out of the water, weigh yourself again while still shiny wet. The difference in weight should be about 4 to 8 kg, depending on your size. So the water in your clothes weighs between 2 and 5 kg, half of it runs off in a minute or two.

Push Ups

Now that you have an idea how much weight is involved you can start your power training. Do a few push ups on the pool side. Next climb out and jump in as often as you can in one minute. This may sound trivial, but you'll soon find out that is can be quite tough.

Front Crawl versus Breaststroke

Swim several length using diiferent swimming strokes. You may find that with all these clothes on front crawl is not much faster than breaststroke or backstroke. Many people don't know that and wear themselves out with front crawl when breaststroke is just as fast. Knowing this difference may save your life one day.

 Reader Comment: College Training

I'm in the swimming team of our college. Twice weekly we practice survival swimming which is my favorite. I love swimming in clothes because it is the most fun way to build strength and muscles. We swim for two or three hours each session, with warm-up showers and snack breaks in between.

Training Tip:
I change into different clothes during the break to get a different workout. I start in a jogging suit in the first part, next I swim in jeans with t-shirt and anorak or poncho, and so on. For speed training I wear a full body lycra suit.

Kevin, Netherlands