Hi, I would like to formally apologize for the late post this week. I try to do a new post at the end of the week, Sunday, or a post at the beginning of the week, Monday, but I ended up falling behind.
I don’t know who my viewers are, hopefully you all are swimmers, but I do imagine a majority of you have been in college, or will attend college, and so hopefully you understand why I am doing an update so late in the week. I fell behind because of the sheer amount of overwhelming homework and studying I had to do for my first few exams of the new semester.
With that being said, the amount of studying and homework I had to do forced me to decrease the number of times I was in the pool, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t still get my body into good condition.
So for the past week, instead of going to the pool every day to get some laps in, I did one quick and easy thing before I went to bed: stretch.
According to this website, people’s flexibility lessens as they get older. Even with regular training in the pool, our muscles get tighter as we age. But why is flexibility important for swimmers? The same website says that stretching should be incorporated into our workouts for two main reason: the lengthening of individual fibers, and the increase of the range of motion in the joints.
Why do we want longer muscle fibers? In simple words, it allows us to pull with more force when our muscles contracts.
And why do we want to increase the range of motion in our joints? The extra range of motion in our joints allows us to use our whole body rather than just the joints, which in turn creates less turbulence in the water.
Together, the longer fibers and extra range in motion prevents us from becoming stiff and requiring more effort per stroke, which in turn lets us save valuable energy that could be used to swim faster.
Stretching is good for all people, not just swimmers, as it can help with blood circulation, align your body posture, relax you and relieve stress, increase oxygen flow, and enhance coordination. More details about how flexibility helps people can be found here.
But here are two of my favorite stretches for the arms: the arm across the chess, which stretches the shoulders and the upper part of your arm, and the hand on your spine stretch, which stretches your triceps.
There are a lot of leg stretches that I like, but the main one I like is called the inner thigh stretch, which can help with your hip and knee joints. Images, gifs and how to’s of four of my favorite leg stretches can be found at this website here
For the stomach, I love doing the rectus stomach stretch and oblique stomach stretch. This website has the same images as below, but it says that the rectus stomach stretch can help build swiftness in movement while the oblique stretch helps to reduce fat from the abdomens. Personally, I love theses stretches because it just feels good.
This is the rectus stomach stretch 
This is the oblique stretch
Lastly is a back stretch. I’m not really sure what it is called, but this website calls it the “Prayer Stretch.” I personally love this stretch, and I do it almost all the time, and I have found that when I do it before bed, I wake up and do not have any pain in the lower back muscles. That’s why I love this back stretch. The website above has three other back stretches if you are interested in learned more about back stretches.
Hopefully, I have convinced you, swimmer or non swimmer, to start doing stretches before bed because there are many health benefits along with swimming benefits.
Getting Back in the Pool 
