Strength Training for Swimmers, With Keenan Robinson

Based on Episode 18 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a conversation between host Joel Smith and USA Swimming high performance director Keenan Robinson.

Almost nobody has thought harder about strength training for swimmers than Keenan Robinson. An athletic trainer by education and the longtime strength coach for Michael Phelps, Robinson has spent two decades figuring out what actually transfers from the weight room to the water, a question he is quick to admit is far messier than it is for land sports. His answers are refreshingly unglamorous: match the weight room to the pool, keep it simple, chase durability more than raw strength, and guard the shoulder above all. Here is how he thinks about building a swimmer on dry land.

Key Takeaways

• Swimmers train nearly year-round with no real off-season. The weight room adds strength, not conditioning, and it has to be dosed against the pool.
• Sport mastery is not weight-room mastery. Start at the basics, and never call a swimmer unathletic.
• Vertical pulls transfer best. Pull-ups and chin-ups build the strength-to-bodyweight and shoulder stability swimming demands.
• Past a point, durability beats more strength. Handling the swim stimulus more often is what drops time at the elite end.
• Protect the shoulder. Swimmers are hypermobile by design, so train peri-scapular and rotator-cuff stability, often with isometrics, early in the week.

Why swimmers are different in the weight room

Robinson starts by pointing out that the sport itself removes half of the strength coach’s usual job. Swimmers barely stop training.

We’re a sport that trains nonstop for about 11 months, three weeks out of a year. There is really no off-season. The title is strength and conditioning, but the conditioning aspect, 99% of the time, is taken care of by the sport itself.

The second difference is readiness. Because swimmers have spent years in a non-gravity-dependent activity, many arrive with high sport skill but almost no experience under load, so their bone density and connective tissue are not prepared for external resistance. That gap frames his whole approach.

Sport mastery has been acquired, but weight-room mastery may not even be relevant yet. So you gotta start at the basics, because they can already swim, and you don’t want to screw that up. You just want to give them a little something that builds on their athletic ability.

What he will not accept is the lazy “fish out of water” label. When a swimmer cannot do a box jump, he says, that is a coaching problem, not an athlete problem.

Athleticism is athleticism, so don’t pigeonhole these athletes because they can’t do a box jump. I ask them, “You get in the water and swim, and tell me how easy that is.” That’s all athletic movement.

Match the weight-room dose to the pool

Robinson’s central rule is that the lifting load cannot be planned in isolation, because the body only has one budget for stress. The weight room has to be coordinated with what the pool is already demanding.

The minimal effective dose has to coincide with the dose that’s being applied in the water. You have a hormonal and metabolic response, a musculoskeletal effect, and a CNS effect, both in the water and out of it.

That is why he insists a strength coach learn the swim coach’s weekly cycle cold, knowing which days are aerobic threshold, which are quality work off the blocks, and which are heavy kick sets, before writing a single lift. He learned that discipline in the Michigan program under Bob Bowman and Jon Urbanchek. From there, the prescription is deliberately humble.

Keep what’s important in. The 200 breaststroke is what’s important. Everything else, a squat, a clean, is just icing on the cake. So keep your weight program simple early on, and see how well they respond and adapt.

The lifts that transfer, and the one that does not

Asked which movements track with good swimmers, Robinson does not hesitate: pulls. Vertical pulling is the lift he trusts most.

Your vertical pulls, pull-ups and chin-ups, that’s the greatest thing, because it’s your only way to induce strength to body-mass ratio. And in all four strokes, it’s the ability to pull your entire body through an external resistance. Program it right and it enhances scapular stability and keeps them having healthy shoulders.

Just as instructive is a correlation he abandoned. For years he believed a strong posterior chain, built with deadlift variations, predicted his best kickers, until the data talked him out of it.

I used to think I had a high correlation between a posterior chain and our best kickers. I’ve now scratched that. Those with the greatest ankle range of motion, and who were given kicking early in their development, are the best kickers. No amount of posterior chain changes that.

How much strength is enough

Robinson’s view of strength is stage-dependent. Early on, teaching a swimmer to lift pays off almost automatically, because a stronger, better-organized athlete moves better in the water. But at the elite end, the returns on adding weight to the bar flatten, and the goal shifts.

If you take him from a 400 squat to a 420 squat, is he really going to get much faster in the 1500 freestyle? Maybe not. But if you make him more durable, he can withstand the swimming stimulus more frequently, do the high-CNS work more often and bounce back. Then you’ve got a shot to drop the time.

He points to a 400 IM silver medalist he coached who took several seconds off a lifetime best on the way to an Olympic medal, an improvement he attributes not to getting stronger but to being able to absorb the training load more often. Once athletes reach that level, he notes, times fall in tenths and hundredths, and durability is what buys them.

Beyond lifting: posture, the spine, and stroke-specific stress

Robinson is blunt that gimmicks do not work (“swim benches don’t work”), and that his most swim-relevant work looks unremarkable. He calls it his aquatic posture catalog: training the trunk to hold position while the limbs move, built around the sport’s most common injuries.

One of the top three pathologies in swimmers is shoulder, medial knee, and low-back issues. So we work on stabilization of those body parts while the extremities are moving. It’s nothing fancy or cool. You won’t find much of it on YouTube.

He maps it to stroke mechanics: the long-axis strokes (backstroke and freestyle) load the spine in rotation, while the short-axis strokes (breaststroke and butterfly) drive repeated flexion and extension that the lumbar spine absorbs as fatigue sets in. Programming, he argues, has to respect each athlete’s actual hip and scapular range rather than forcing motion that is anatomically not there.

Go easy on jumps and plyometrics

If Robinson could change one thing in swim strength programs, it would be the reflexive pile of jumps. His objection is about readiness, not disdain for power.

Do they have the requisite strength to even begin those activities? Is their anatomy ready? Given that they’ve done a primarily non-gravity-dependent, endurance activity, doing a bunch of jumps and plyos too soon might kick off a stress fracture.

Before loading impact, he wants to see clean landing mechanics rather than knee valgus, real dorsiflexion instead of overpronation, and an honest answer to whether jump power even transfers to the water, which he suspects it does only modestly, and mostly for the walls in short-course racing. The point is to program plyometrics on purpose, not by habit.

Protecting the swimmer’s shoulder

Shoulder pathology is the number-one problem in the sport, and Robinson’s framing is counterintuitive: the same trait that makes swimmers hurt is the one that makes them great.

Most of our swimmers are swimming because they have that hypermobility in the glenohumeral joint. Is it a bad thing or a good thing? I’d contend it’s a good thing, but it’s our job to be very meticulous about what we do to stabilize it.

Because the pecs, anterior delts, and internal rotators work at roughly a three-to-one ratio against the back of the shoulder, he is careful about what he adds and what he omits. He does not try to make the rotator cuff bigger; he trains its real job, centralizing the humeral head in the socket, and he times that work early in the week when the nervous system can still learn it. His most concrete finding came from studying post-surgical rotator-cuff rehab and borrowing its first steps.

When we introduced isometric activities to our cuffs, just holding the positions of our special tests, we really saw an improvement on the diagnostic ultrasound of the tissue integrity of our cuff muscles.

He pairs those low-level isometrics with light perturbations at the wrist or elbow to keep the joint firing and centered, treating shoulder care as a nervous-system skill as much as a strength one. His stance on stretching follows the same logic: swimming causes adaptive shortening, so elongating that tissue to head off tendinopathy is worth doing, as long as you know your individual athlete.

Frequently asked questions

What is dryland training for swimmers?
Dryland is the strength and movement work swimmers do out of the pool. In Robinson’s approach it centers on teaching sound lifting, building pulling strength and shoulder stability, and protecting the spine and shoulder, all dosed carefully against the heavy training load the sport already imposes in the water.

What strength exercises are best for swimmers?
He rates vertical pulls (pull-ups and chin-ups) highest, because they build strength relative to bodyweight and reinforce scapular and shoulder stability that carries into all four strokes. He keeps the barbell program simple and treats squats and cleans as supportive rather than the point.

How much should swimmers lift?
Enough to teach the lift and build a base of strength early, then a shift toward durability. Past sport mastery, adding weight to the bar does little for race times, so the aim becomes tolerating the swim workload more often rather than chasing a bigger one-rep max.

Should swimmers do plyometrics?
Only once they have the strength and anatomical readiness for it. Because swimmers spend years in a low-impact environment, too many jumps too soon can risk stress fractures, so Robinson wants clean landing mechanics first and a real reason the power will transfer.

How do you prevent shoulder injuries in swimmers?
Respect the hypermobility that makes swimmers good, then train stability around it: peri-scapular strength and endurance, and rotator-cuff work aimed at centralizing the humeral head, often as low-level isometrics with light perturbations, programmed early in the week while the nervous system can adapt.

About the authors

Keenan Robinson is the National Team High Performance Director for USA Swimming and an athletic trainer by background. He has worked with the University of Michigan, North Baltimore Aquatic Club, and Arizona State, served as head athletic trainer for the USA Olympic team in Rio in 2016, and is the longtime strength coach for Michael Phelps, blending strength and conditioning with sports medicine in the swimming world.

Joel Smith is the host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast and the founder of Just Fly Sports, a former collegiate strength and track and field coach focused on speed, power, and athletic development. Listen to the full episode with Keenan Robinson on Just Fly Sports.