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Many sports, each has such nice exercise stratagem. Even though swimming is my most favorite since I've been swimming for decade,

cycling: the most enjoyment of scenery, 26km (how I do per day) gives you a lot of different views; mountain, river, road, smell of air along the ways. These are also good for brain.

basketball: it just nicely exercises agility, muscle memory (imagine you nail it 10/10 shooting continually, how nice the muscle is!), reactivity, quick decision making as a team.

table tennis: it is incredible how you can control the small ball in very fast interaction, in very small area (table). Little skills you gain from this is mind-blowing to me.

I play a lot of other sports, I'm very satisfied what my body can do, and breaking current limit is also fun.

I tried most, but eventually settled with surfing and table tennis.

Running broke my hips, cycling is too expensive and dangerous, and I got tired of swimming. Too boring. I only do a long distance race once a year on our river, which is fun.

Many sports are at best when we were young with friends doing the same activities. And yes, it's boring when we are adult now. Treat it as regular eating, showering, although it's more effort, it's just boringly good, sometimes it's fun. They are just activities that our body need every day, otherwise our body is vulnerable to whatever pains.

Any sport that's good for you is great. (Not a big fan of running either, but jogging in the morning is quite nice)

Triathlons:

Swimming is the sea Cycling is the air Running is the earth

You learn to appreciate and respect them all.

Swimming is birth: thrown into an unfamiliar environment, you struggle to find your way Cycling is youth/midlife: You have your footing, now you speed through life with ease Running is old age: slower than you were in your prime, you learn persistence as your body weakens.

I feel your analogy needs a fourth sport to complete the 4 elements. But what sport would be represented by fire? Perhaps competitive shooting (gunpowder=fire)

Maybe the participant is the fire, interacting with the three other elements?

This year I'm doing a "Swedish Classic", which is 4 long distance races throughout the year. Three of them are the classics in triathlon, but the fourth is cross country skiing (or "nordic skiing"). So the opposite of fire, hmm, but could maybe say that fire is what makes it possible to traverse 90km of mountains in the winter.

Biathlon is ice and fire.

Martial Arts Kata comes to mind. Explosive.

How about swimming in an onsen swimming pool (make one if not exist)?

I used to do a mini triathlon, it feels like hell already!

The fourth sport in a regular triathlon is transition. You burn away any lead you had (as you can't get your shoes on etc) and emerge from the flames reborn as a new type of athlete.

Swimming is the lowest impact on your body too. Anything involving running includes frequent jolts to ankles/knees/hips/lower back.

Cycling on standard bicycles concentrates pressure on your genitals and the nerve-dense region areas around them, and puts some pressure on the lower back.

Swimming can cause unique injuries to shoulders if your form isn't right, but otherwise is very smooth and low-impact.

I was surprised to learn from a friend that he needed shoulder surgery due to swimming exercise.

Can you share any resources or personal thoughts for maintaining form that avoids injury?

I hope there's a good answer to this. At the moment my solution is to not do crawl.

I read a blog of someone preparing for a 24-hour swim around one of the Swiss lakes and he was explaining about how it's important to get the reach and catch right. I understood this to mean getting your body rotation, shoulder and slightly-bent, extended arm into the most mechanically advantageous position. I imagine that this minimises "difficult" stresses on the shoulder joint. I'm trying to implement this without a trainer and it seems not to be irritating my (unrelated) shoulder injury.

It may have been somewhere on this (http://reminiscencesofalongdistanceswimmer.blogspot.com) blog

Generally for freestyle you want to follow these rules to avoid shoulder injury:

1.) Don't cross the center line of your body with your arm. If you were climbing a ladder you wouldn't ever do that. Freestyle is kind of like climbing a ladder horizontally.

2.) Keep a good rotation around your center line in the upper body. This helps to use your back muscles/lats to do the big work. You want to be sore at the end of the workout in your lats, core and maybe chest. Not your shoulders.

3.) Don't over-extend your arm in reach. Many people end up pushing down on the water they initiate their stroke, this is wasted work and also shoulder strain. You want to as quickly as possible have your hand pulling parallel to your body, which usually means a high, wide elbow in the catch.

This is a course I've been meaning to try but haven't. It purports to reduce shoulder injuries:

https://www.swimsmooth.com

This is the current view on how to initiate your pull:

https://www.triswimcoach.com/high-elbow-catch/

+ avoid swim paddles. In my club most injuries were due to swim paddles.

> Don't cross the center line of your body with your arm. If you were climbing a ladder you wouldn't ever do that

Hmm, that doesn't sound quite right to me. I claim no knowledge especially in swimming technique so this is just for curious discussion and you can put me right - as a weightlifter, the most natural and least impinged arm motion for me is a diagonal across the body whereas perpendicular swinging motions are crunchy and impinged.

If I climb a ladder, I'm propelling myself with my legs and only holding on with my arms by pulling my chest to the ladder so that seems like a bad analogy. Incidentally, if you ever want to feel like your forearms might split out of their skin, try climbing a wind turbine ladder! I think I ended up having to finish it by hugging the ladder in my elbow creases having lost all grip strength due to forearm pump.

You are sort of making a diagonal movement anyway because of the rotation, that rotation is what's engaging the rest of your muscles to help you pull the water. If you cross the line, it's much harder to use your lats, your core or your chest to pull the water and instead you're using almost solely your shoulder and with increased resistance too.

That increased resistance is not helping you propell forward either, you're propelling diagonally with the stroke in that case which is a waste.

It’s true ladders are mostly leg. It’s not the best analogy perhaps a better one is pulling yourself up onto a box. You wouldn’t put your hands close to the center of the body, you’d have them out wide as you push.

Not sure what you’re referring to in terms of lifting diagonally, but as another comment noted in swimming you’re rotating around the center line with each stroke. If you were doing right-arm cable pull downs, you likely aren’t going to have the most strength with your right hand level with your left shoulder. You may rotate, using your core an back to bring the arm down but in those cases I doubt you’re crossing the center line high up in that motion.

Because of the rotation in swimming you can end up with your arm that way which will impinge on the rotator cuff.

Essentially you want to stabilize your shoulder with your lats and scapular muscles so that it doesn’t fall forward in the socket. That is what causes swimming repetitive use injuries. I say this as someone with two surgically repaired shoulders. I’ve done a lot of stroke work to keep them fixed after years of bad form.

Also, I think, try swimming slowest just to keep moving forward. I find it's good for finding balance.

Even very talented swimmers can have shoulder problems from over training. That's what cortisone shots are for.

I must put in a word for my favorite sport: week-long solo backpacking. Meditation, frustration, overcoming, self-reliance, singing at the top of your lungs, not speaking for days, exhaustion, mental challenge, pushing yourself, scenery and more scenery, plenty hypoxia too. Bonus euphoria for some high summits, sleeping under the stars, catching your own food, not being eaten by predators, swimming in frozen lakes, etc. Use hiking poles for full-body workout, go off-trail for some mental exercise, push your boundaries and immerse yourself for days on end.

That sounds amazing but I’d be terrified to attempt this. Any good beginner resources you recommend?

Join a club, e.g. Colorado Mountain Club. You can rent gear for starters. Good backpacking gear is expensive and it's continuously getting better, so renting is totally sane and you probably come out ahead until you're going often. You could start by going with people doing a gear checkout, quick overnighter, not too far from their car. Do at least a basic first aid course, consider more formal wilderness training, also available through the club.

In my years I've been a keen swimmer and cyclist. When I'm pool swimming, I don't usually get that euphoric high until the cool air of outside hits me in the face as I'm leaving the building. The harder I swam, the higher the high, but it never hits me until the outside air hits my lungs. It's incomparable.

When I'm on my bike, I reach that same meditative trance. It's just the road, the pain in my legs and lungs and the focus on getting to the end of my ride, little by little, kilometre by kilometre. Everything else just falls away. My problems don't matter when I'm on my bike. The pain ensures that my focus is occupied and I'm present. Completely present. When I reach the end of my ride and fall from my bike because my legs won't carry me, the high comes as I lay trying to catch my breath.

There may be something to your observation that it could be related to hypoxia. Either way, the high is real.

Swimming is a potential deadly sport - you could drown.

With this in mind, I learned the technical aspects of swimming which forced me to focus on the here and now. If you are not focussed you make mistakes which can lead to swallowing water.

I did this in order to swim longer and faster. I finally grasped the highly meditational aspect of swimming and enjoy it.

Even though I prefer running over swimming nothing comes close to swimming in regards to meditation.

Congratulations on finishing the race!

Have you seen the documentary "Kim Swims" about the first woman to swim from the Farallon Islands to San Francisco?

No but I'll look it up! That's a crazy, crazy swim.

> That or maybe it's just the hypoxia ;)

Or a kind of mild hypothermia? I've experienced your "euphoric feeling" during and after swims in cooler water. Google tells me the water temperature in San Francisco Bay is about fourteen degrees Celsius.

> Hypoxia is a condition in which the body or a region of the body is deprived of adequate oxygen supply at the tissue level.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoxia_(medical)

Read the actual comment.

You should look into aquatic ape theory, it might explain why we feel so good when we swim. One of the ideas is that swimming required us to develop breath control, which was a prerequisite for developing speech.

That just gave me an idea of circular swimming pool.

They exist and they are very annoying compared to regular old 50m lanes. You end up having to constantly overcompensate to one side (obviously) but also you suddenly have to either burn in a constant bias to your technique (bad) or be constantly aware of the boundaries, which ruins the normal flow of pool swimming. They are fun for families and kids who only ever do one or a half round, but if you like swimming just stick to traditional pools.

I once saw a documentary about a fish farm where they had tanks where fish were forced to swim in circles. Probably not the most fish friendly environment.

How about a pool in a rotating orbital space station? Just keep swimming forwards and slightly uphill :) Just don't lose the fake G or you could be the first person to drown in space.

It’s never uphill though, while rotating “halo” looks like it bends upwards, force-wise it feels flat.

That was a plot point in the movie "Passengers".

So, clearly the solution should be a figure-eight swimming pool? Where 1/3 of the time you're going straight, 1/3 overcorrecting left, 1/3 right

No, the solution is to move the water and have the swimming equivalent of a treadmill. NB: this already actually exists, only remember seeing it in a video at some point though.

"Endless Pool".

They have this at the main Google campus in MTV

That's true. The motivation for the swimmer is to not get sucked into the intake. I can hear the coach laughing maniacally as he turns the speed up to 11.

It's called a river. I do a lot if river swimming, but you need to live in a country with clean rivers.

But swimming in lakes is more fun and better for your technique.

You probably saw it in person as well, it's called a river :) In Zurich there's multiple places where you can swim in the Limmat, and it takes quite some effort to stay in place - one example is https://images.app.goo.gl/qTASdR51yDTiCk299 (of course you could go without the installation but this allows people to use it that would be afraid of getting carried away ...)

Is there something like this in Berlin?

Could be some settings at the new Wellenwerk that achieve this

It would be so amazing to live near a river with water clean enough to do this :(

The problem with this is that the current is constant. When doing a long set I sometimes accent the arms and the legs alternately over say 200m. Well typically three lengths of arms and one length of kick dominated effort. The thing is the speed does change from one technique to other but moving the water at a constant speed over a short distance doesn't work properly. So it's cute for a little swimming but it's not compelling for serious training. Never mind if you want try doing an individual medley set.

make it a bit longer and have it vary the speed on the position of the swimmer...

Or just have the water channel narrow so the water velocity increases as you move forward.

Interesting - do you know if the negative effects of circular swimming pool affect fish hatcheries? (fish are forced to swim against current)

If I had to guess, I'd say not as much b/c of the size of the fish.

Most fish farms force fish to swim through a current of running water. I think most are concrete “runs” that continuously pump water through. At least what I’ve seen in the US is that way. There are now many overseas fish farms.

Regular pool, open two lanes, swim laps (up one lane, down the other). It's done with two lanes, so there is enough room to pass. I've seen it done this way several places.

I’m confused as to what you are suggesting here? Normally you swim right side of the lane and turn going back on the “left side”, with room to pass on the inside unless the lane is filled with two many people. What does using two lanes add, except ruining your turns?

If the pool was long enough, that wouldn’t be an issue. Thanks for the excellent post.

A similar idea is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_tank

There are also swimming "treadmills". I experienced a water jet a long time ago and it was ok, but I think these are a bit more sophisticated. These could be cool, never been in one though.

https://www.endlesspools.com/

Edit: Looked into them, they're pretty cool. You can option them with a mirror on the bottom to do form work, they take up far less space than a real pool and the fastest can sustain a pace of 51s/100yard which is very very quick.

Don't forget open-water swimming. Swimming is transformed without walls.

How did you find the Alcatraz race ? Was water too cold ? I would love to do this but bit scared about shark attack lol ( i know there are no sharks in bay)

Water temperature is about 58°F / 14°C. With a decent wetsuit the water temperature will be fine for most everyone, although the real tough swimmers go without.

There are sharks in the Bay, mostly leopard sharks which aren't dangerous to people. At times there may be a few great white sharks as well but you'll probably never see one.