Bad Swimming form - calories

xDaynie

Hi there.

Before I start, my form isn't bad, I swam competitively at school so I am not a beginner and my form is not bad, but it's not great as I've just started back after 10 years.

Would bad form and exerting yourself more through that lose more calories than say if you had a perfect form for the same swimming timeframe?

Just wondered this.

Thanks!

NorthCascades

Probably if you swam the same distance, because it would take more work to do. But it would probably mean less distance and more or less equal out, but put more stress on your body.

lynn_glenmont

xDaynie wrote: »

Hi there.

Before I start, my form isn't bad, I swam competitively at school so I am not a beginner and my form is not bad, but it's not great as I've just started back after 10 years.

Would bad form and exerting yourself more through that lose more calories than say if you had a perfect form for the same swimming timeframe?

Just wondered this.

Thanks!

I'm not sure about time, but I think it would burn more calories for the same distance, since you're wasting energy on inefficient movement.

For time, it's possible a swimmer with very good form might be efficiently bringing more energy to the game. That is, in crossing the pool with powerful strokes in 20 seconds (I'm not a swimmer, so these are just numbers I'm using for an example*), swimmer A might expend 3 calories, but clumsy swimmer B might take a full minute to cross the pool, spending 7 calories to cross the pool, but only about 2 calories per 20 seconds.


*Actually, I ended up basing those numbers on the assumption that a stronger, experienced, efficient swimmer would be able to maintain 600-calorie an hour level of exertion, while a weaker, inexperienced, inefficient swimmer would only be able to maintain a 400-calorie an hour level of exertion, which from other forms of cardio is a reasonable assumption, I believe (not the exact numbers, that is, but the idea that a well-conditioned athlete can maintain a higher level of exertion/calorie-burn).

kshama2001

xDaynie wrote: »

Hi there.

Before I start, my form isn't bad, I swam competitively at school so I am not a beginner and my form is not bad, but it's not great as I've just started back after 10 years.

Would bad form and exerting yourself more through that lose more calories than say if you had a perfect form for the same swimming timeframe?

Just wondered this.

Thanks!

Your form is probably not as bad as you think and will get better quickly. So while this isn't really something to worry about, it is an interesting question.

I've always assumed that since I have old wooden snow shoes that are surely far less efficient than modern ones that I burn more calories than someone with better shoes, but I just use the entry in MFP.

NovusDies

Whether or not more calories or less calories are burnt doesn't help because there is no easy way to calculate the variance.

I suspect the pride of resuming a previous form is probably going to add motivation to continue and that is more important.

lorrpb

Poor form will feel more exhausting but not sure it burn significantly more or less calories.

Inspirationalwaterjug

I burn about the same, whether I’m fresh first swim of the week or total trash form end of the week swim when I’m fatigued everywhere. And that with a swim hr monitor so I feel like it’s pretty accurate.

Danp

Yep, that's the whole 'newbie gains' thing. Improving form is one of the reasons you tend to need to workout longer and harder as you progress. In the same way that much of the 'strength' improvements made while lifting aren't actually the muscles getting stronger rather it comes from improved form and neurological changes letting your brain better and more efficiently use the muscle available.

Terrible form is a real calorie burner

Kotuliak

I'm curious, how many calories do you estimate per minute of swimming? (I plugged in my numbers in the swimming calculator at http://www.swimmingcalculator.com/swim_calories_calculator.php and it gives me 15 calories per minute, which seems very high. I track it at MFP at 12 calories per minute.)

kenyonhaff

kshama2001 wrote: »

xDaynie wrote: »

Hi there.

Before I start, my form isn't bad, I swam competitively at school so I am not a beginner and my form is not bad, but it's not great as I've just started back after 10 years.

Would bad form and exerting yourself more through that lose more calories than say if you had a perfect form for the same swimming timeframe?

Just wondered this.

Thanks!

Your form is probably not as bad as you think and will get better quickly. So while this isn't really something to worry about, it is an interesting question.

I've always assumed that since I have old wooden snow shoes that are surely far less efficient than modern ones that I burn more calories than someone with better shoes, but I just use the entry in MFP.

I have both types of snowshoes. The old wooden ones simply works a bit differently than the modern ones, and they are sometimes more efficient...depending on the environment, type of snow, etc. I find the wooden ones better for deep snow, the modern ones much better for lighter snow.

AnnPT77

Danp wrote: »

Yep, that's the whole 'newbie gains' thing. Improving form is one of the reasons you tend to need to workout longer and harder as you progress. In the same way that much of the 'strength' improvements made while lifting aren't actually the muscles getting stronger rather it comes from improved form and neurological changes letting your brain better and more efficiently use the muscle available.
le.
Terrible form is a real calorie burner

I don't know that the bolded can be said, as a generality.

I'm not an expert, but I think that for many activities, a skilled/trained person is capable of burning substantially more calories per minute than an untrained one (because they generate more "output" per minute, for lack of a better generalized term (for specifics, like distance or speed, that might apply to a particular activity); and that the unskilled person may burn some extra calories per unit of achievable "output" compared with the same output of a trained person, with the magnitude of that difference being related to efficiency characteristics that would be wildly different depending on the activity in question.

My understanding, for example, that the efficiency of beginners and skilled people is within quite a small range, for cycling, because the motion is so constrained, so unskilled and skilled people hitting the same watts are burning very close to the same number of calories. The range is probably greater for walking/running, but perhaps still not huuuuuge.

I don't know about swimming efficiency; all I know about it is that I find it unenjoyable (though essential ).

The one thing I'm pretty sure of is that any given activity at any given achievable level of output per time period will feel much more difficult to a beginner vs. a skilled person, and that's going to confound most self-assessments of calorie burn. Also, heart-rate-based estimates of calorie expenditure are also somewhat likely to overstate the calorie burn of a beginner and understate that of a skilled person, for quite a range of activities, which also confounds the assessment. On a quick skim, I didn't find any METS-based estimates in the Compendium of Physical Activities that are listed explicitly with efficiency level (vs. output) distinctions, so no help there that I saw.

The only activities I know enough about to make an educated guess are indoor and on-water rowing. It's common for beginners to indoor rowing to say that they can't get a vigorous workout on a rowing machine, when the real problem is that they don't have a sufficiently efficient technique to actually reach a meaningful intensity level. In that case, terrible form is a poor calorie burner (per time period).

At the same time, I see people waste energy on a rowing machine (some of the same people, sometimes ) doing things that don't create "distance" or "speed". (In quotes because obviously the machine is sitting in one spot, so speed and distance are more vitual than real.) They probably burn slightly more calories per 500 (virtual) meters than a skilled person, but the effort doesn't go into the flywheel so the machine doesn't measure it. The waste doesn't, in a pure guess, result in burning as many extra calories as the inefficiency is costing in underperformance, so I suspect we're still in the realm of bad form being a poor calorie burner, on a per-minute basis, though arguably the opposite per meter.

In on-water rowing, inefficiency limits workout intensity and speed (so limits calorie burn per time period), but on-water rowing doesn't IMO have quite as much potential for spending pure-waste calories that don't result in distance or speed (because in a boat, those kinds of inefficiencies turn the activity into swimming instead of rowing, often). Inefficient people just go slow, and don't look like they're burning remarkably large numbers of calories doing it.

Danp

Yeah, I thought the smiley conveyed the flippant nature of the last line of the comment.

I guess not

AnnPT77

Danp wrote: »

Yeah, I thought the smiley conveyed the flippant nature of the last line of the comment.

I guess not

I might've felt differently about it if it were a LOL (and this is a thing that many people oddly actually seem to think, that skill means way less calorie burn for the same output).

But "wordy over-analysis" is kinda my middle name in any case.

Sorry. :flowerforyou:

tirowow12385

If you are inefficient from going from point A to point B, you will use more energy and burn more calories.

Azdak

tirowow12385 wrote: »

If you are inefficient from going from point A to point B, you will use more energy and burn more calories.

Rather than retype, I refer you to AnnPT77 detailed comment above.

TL:dr Inefficiency impairs performance to such a degree that calorie burn is less, not more.

tirowow12385

Azdak wrote: »

tirowow12385 wrote: »

If you are inefficient from going from point A to point B, you will use more energy and burn more calories.

Rather than retype, I refer you to AnnPT77 detailed comment above.

TL:dr Inefficiency impairs performance to such a degree that calorie burn is less, not more.

Efficiency means minimal effort for maximum output, inefficiency means more effort and not necassarily max output.

When she refers to her form being bad when swimming, it could be any number of reasons wrong with her swimming techniques but they all result in her creating more drag in the water and she needs to put more effort in

Ever heard of aerodyanmics and cars? The concept is applicable to swimming. Poorly design autombiles have more drag just like a swimmer with bad form, they use more fuel. She is burning more calories being inefficient and overtime will burn less the more her form is improved.

lynn_glenmont

Azdak wrote: »

tirowow12385 wrote: »

If you are inefficient from going from point A to point B, you will use more energy and burn more calories.

Rather than retype, I refer you to AnnPT77 detailed comment above.

TL:dr Inefficiency impairs performance to such a degree that calorie burn is less, not more.

You seem to have misread AnnPT77, who says that

a skilled/trained person is capable of burning substantially more calories per minute than an untrained one (because they generate more "output" per minute, for lack of a better generalized term (for specifics, like distance or speed, that might apply to a particular activity); and that the unskilled person may burn some extra calories per unit of achievable "output" compared with the same output of a trained person, with the magnitude of that difference being related to efficiency characteristics that would be wildly different depending on the activity in question.

Where output is distance, that means that

tirowow12385 wrote: »

If you are inefficient from going from point A to point B, you will use more energy and burn more calories.

"going from point A to point B" = distance

AnnPT77

jm_1234 wrote: »

tirowow12385 wrote: »

Ever heard of aerodyanmics and cars? The concept is applicable to swimming. Poorly design automobiles have more drag just like a swimmer with bad form, they use more fuel. She is burning more calories being inefficient and overtime will burn less the more her form is improved.

Great example. I also know from first hand experience that as my performance gets better I feel as if I use less energy/burn fewer calories. I have to continue progressively overloading my training to get a good workout.

For example, when I trained for a half marathon I would run at a 9:40 pace with an average HR in the high 160s. As I improved, my 9:40 pace had an average HR in the low 140s. Running at the same pace over the same distance, my perceived physical exertion went from high to low as I improved, my time to recovery also decreased, and my energy levels after exercise were higher.

One thing I noticed is that as my average and resting HR decreases due to cardio training, I feel as if my metabolism also decreases. I'm guessing this is because my body is recompositioning to be more efficient so I lose non-essential muscle mass and my body becomes more efficient at supplying and using blood/oxygen which results in me working less at the same pace and distance.

Keep in mind I am talking about endurance activities, not activities that require max power output. As I get more fit I have a higher max power output so when I perform activities that require max power I'm sure I burn more calories.

"Feeling" is a terrible estimator of calorie burn. The things I bolded (and some others I bolded) are training effect. Fitness improves, you feel better at intensities that used to be truly difficult, and you're able to go faster (or exceed other output measures) with the same perceived exertion, plus probably sustain any given exertion longer. That's what improving fitness is.

I think you're confounding training effect with calorie burn.

Some activities probably do have larger efficiency factors (differences between unskilled and skilled people) than others. But the same work output at the same efficiency ** by a person of the same size burns approximately the same number of calories, because it's the work that matters to calorie burn (in pretty much the physics sense of "work"), not the subjective feelings of the person doing the work.

** i.e., ignoring the effect of wasted energy that may burn calories, but doesn't improve objective measure of output like speed, measured watts, etc. And those "wasted energy" effects are surprisingly small, for a large range of activities. It's kind of why METS-based estimating can do a fair job of calorie approximation, if used sensibly.

Yes, we absolutely have to keep working harder (challenge ourselves) as we get fitter, in order to continue getting fitter still. That's about training effect. It doesn't directly apply to calorie burn. They're not the same thing.

I'll give you a specific example: I've been rowing (indoors and on-water) for 17 years or so. At first, I was probably quite inefficient. But I had excellent, regular coaching, and improved pretty fast technically, so my efficiency was most of the way there (the big stuff) pretty quickly. Back in the early days, knocking out a rowing machine pace that was good for 100 watts over any moderate time period (10 minutes, say) was quite difficult, a real challenge. I wasn't very fit. Now it's a fairly easy pace (it would be super easy if I weren't short, female and 64 ). I can do a lot more now, for longer periods of time. But 10 minutes at 100 watts, at the same bodyweight burns about the same number of calories it did when it was really hard for me, because my efficiency isn't much different. 100 watts for 10 minutes is still the same objective output (virtual meters, watts) as it always was, and that plus the efficiency issues are the main pieces that go into calorie burn. I just feel lots different doing the same work.

Feeling (RPE) doesn't correlate well with calorie burn, over changes in fitness especially. Even heart rate monitor estimates may not necessarily correlate well with calorie burn, over changes in fitness.