Looking for non-swimming swimming exercises.

Someone posted a question about this in the strength forum recently - you should check it out.

-Danielle

Thanks for the info/advice. I guess I sold myself short on my distance the other day.Im looking at a tri on June 1st and didnt think that I could get ready for it. After reading a bit more on swimming,  I might be able to get to 400-500 yards before then.

Im going to start adding strength exercises to the routine. Thanks again. 

Sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, etc are great all around exercises. Any core strengthening will help not only your swimming but everything else too. Here are a couple very swimming specific dryland activities that will help your swimming.

Band Training

Core Work 

Another thing I used to do and I had my HS swimmers do is to "swim" in front of your bathroom mirror. Bend at the waist and do the front crawl in front of the mirror. Look at your hand entry, it should be directly in front of your shoulder. "Catch" with a high elbow as your other arm starts to recover. You can see your body rotate when your arm is recovering and you can see how stretching your hand during the entry and rotating  gives you a longer finish with the opposite hand. After a few minutes of doing this you will also see that it's a pretty good shoulder strengthening exercise as well.

Good luck!! 

Since distance swimming is not about strength but technique and endurance doing pull ups, push ups, triceps, etc won't help you for swimming. Land drills with an elastic band to is a great way to replicate the catch and pull as it will help you develop muscle memory (you don't do it for strength). Another one is using a long stick/tube to ‘paddle’ is another great land drill for muscle memory to replicate the recovery phase and imprint the correct arm position for the pull. Finally, practicing your stroke next to a mirror from the front and side are also great ways to imprint proper stroke form.

here you'll find examples: http://goswim.tv/entries/s/1/drills.html?page=2 you might need to do some digging around but I am sure they have the land drills, at least they used to. Still, you'll get tons of videos to work on your techique, that will make you faster!