Cardio and recovery

Hej,

I like to do cardio sessions on my off days and I have heard active recovery is good but atm the only cardio I can do is swimming as my ankle is too injured to run and my bike is too broken to ride for distance. (everytime i ride that bike it feels like it will fall into pieces) So my question is how will swimming affect my training as most of it is upper body until my ankle is healed enough? How much would be too much on my recovery days? I was thinking 30 mins which would be up to 1km of swimming at a moderately easy pace this would be about 3-4 times a week. At my best I have could swim for 75 doing 4km freestyle although I havent been swimming as much lately. I am trying to cut down as I don't want it to negate my strength training.

cheers for any and all responses =)

I think that as long as it's not eating into your recovery, you should be fine. That means keep it light. You ought to be getting enough calories to support the habit, though. But since you are using NT, I don't think that's a problem.

well I guess I will play around with it and see how much is too much and then start decreasing from there. Working out is hard... not because the work out is difficult but because I want to do everything all the time every day and unfortunately human bodies just aren't really capable of that. stupid recovery time... anyway

Cheers mate =)

You could try "water jogging"

Put water running floats on your upper calves instead of your ankles , or use a water running belt or other flotation device and do jogging/biking leg movements in the deep end. If your ankle isn't too bad it shouldn't bother it. Also try whip kick (breast stroke kick) as the sole of the foot pushes the water it is easier on the ankle joints.

One trick to judging a recovery swim is to see how far you can go comfortably in 10 min, then set up a workout to go triple that distance in 40-45 min using the distances/styles that you like. So if I do 750m in 10 min doing 75m free for every 25m back I could set up 11 series 200m on 4 minutes. That should keep me nice and aerobic and at a reasonable distance.

The single biggest thing people forget with recovery work is that you're still burning 4-5x the normal amount of calories. Don't forget to eat for the extra work! That will be the single biggest thing that bites you in the rear and messes with progress... the food is very important.

I like the idea synchroGENized has about judging recovery swims. I never swim for that long anymore and I haven't ever done recovery swims so I don't have any real input other than keeping the effort level at a 4-5 out of 10.

thanks for the input guys I will give it a shot and see how I feel. Also I eat after everything I do, even work. I work 7 hours on my feet every day so I try to snack while at work but it can be hard sometimes and I usually end up having a good meal straight afterwards. My biggest concern with the swimming is it is using all the same muscles as my training in an aerobic way where as running or bike riding wouldn't be. I have no idea if that makes any real difference but was concerned it may have a more negative impact on my strength gains than if i were to do some cardio with the legs mainly.

I suspect that it won't affect your principal movers, as long as you keep well within your endurance capacity. But depending on your swimming technique it might affect the smaller "helper" muscles.

If we were talking about regular weight lifting I would be certain it would. I'm still not clear how much stronger the "helper" muscles get using Gymnastic Strength Training™.

Please let us know how it works out