A host of the UAE’s best national junior and first team swimmers flew to Spain this week for their first experience of a high-altitude training camp.
Altitude training is a long-standing tradition in the world of elite swimmers and, although opinions are divided over the benefits of this method of training, many top swim teams send their squads to high altitude facilities to prepare for major meets.
The UAE junior swimmers are getting ready for this month’s Dubai International Swimming Championships (April 23-26), where they’ll get a chance to record qualifying times for this August’s Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing, China. Meanwhile, the first team swimmers have the FINA Swimming World Cup series in August and GCC Long Course Championships in September to prepare for.
The swimmers, accompanied by Russian coach Sergey Burkov and his Egyptian assistant coach Mohamed El Zanaty, will spend two weeks in Spain's Sierra Nevada, where they’ll be training 2,320m above sea level.
“I’ve gone through this type of training in Sierra Nevada as a swimmer nine times in my career and it was very beneficial for me, so that’s why I recommended it for our national team swimmers,” El Zanaty told Sport360°. “We want to test our swimmers after their first altitude training camp. It can be a double-edged sword. Either their bodies will respond well to it and get great results, or maybe it can have a negative effect on their results. We won’t really know until they’ve tried it.”
El Zanaty, a retired open water champion, added: “The oxygen levels are really low up there. Every swimmer has a certain lung capacity, but at high altitude, workingout with lack of oxygen, muscles get used to performing these work outs with low levels of oxygen.
“When the swimmer goes back to normal sea level, they receive high levels of oxygen – that unexpected rush of oxygen intake gives explosive power to the body. The body can have an unpredictable response to that, depending on each swimmer.”
He admits it is risky to take the junior swimmers to the camp so close to the Dubai meet, but says they will have more than one chance to qualify for Nanjing.
Yaaqoub Al Saadi (backstroke), Marwan Al Hammadi (freestyle) and Ali Al Kaabi (butterfly) are within touching distance of qualifying times.
“Yaaqoub has swum a qualifying time before but he didn’t do it in a qualifying event, so hopefully he can do it. Ali is also really close, he’s about 0.2 seconds away from the qualifying time and Marwan is about 0.17 seconds behind,” says El Zanaty. “We’re trying to create history for the UAE by trying to qualify rather than send them via wildcards.”
