I can't answer for collegiate guys, but I have been doing 2 years of pretty well every day. The "problem" with swimming slow too often is that you never really get the technique of swimming at speed. The hydrodynamics change the faster you go, and you can't really make your technique good doing a ton of really easy swimming. I get it that you have to swim slow to swim fast, but some technicall aspects really come to light swimming fast, which generally means swimming at high cardio loads. And breathing is impacted the harder you go so unless you go hard enough, you can't really see how badly your breathing messes up your stroke compared to when you can breath going easy.

Because of the non weight bearing nature of swimming, I don't see a ton of value doing any days without intensity of some kind or the other....not so much doing intensity for fitness improvement reasons, but doing speed for technical improvement reasons...and you can recover from that by tomorrow pretty easily if the intensity is not a ton. It might take a BIT of time to get there, but if you are a fit triathlete, I would say that inside of 2 months you can get to the point where you have varying degrees of intensity every day. That's just my 2 cents.

At 30k per week, you aren't really looking at what top collegiate swimmers are doing. Generally, theyre doing double that volume, or more.

But, generally there aren't recovery swim sessions. The training focus will vary from day to day, but at least when I was swimming we had at a minimum every 5th training time block "off" for recovery, with a block being a morning or evening (2 blocks per day. 14 per week) will

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2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

Jason, would you concur, with my statement that unless you go fast, you can't actually practice the technique needed to go fast. I'll use breast stroke as an extreme example....there is literally no resemblance between the hydrodynamics of swimming easy and fast. It's like doing 2 different strokes. If I put my fins on it changes my body position in the water (positively) but that affects my skull and catch. I have to catch more water and pull harder or it feels like I am "slipping".

In any case, I don't see a good reason why you would not do some intensity in every swim when doing single swims per day. Same thing biking. I can't remember a single XC ski in my life that was all easy...there were always pickups for technical reasons...timing and coordination change at speed. Running is a different story in that timing, coordination and foot speed and landing/push off force do change, at speed, but the cost of doing that often was not a good trade off. Nevertheless our track coach had us end every workout with 10x25-50 m strides/accelerations and we were running 6-10 times per week.

I agree with Jason. Even when I was swimming 50-60k yards a week in HS, active recovery days were never part of our program. We were off Sundays; that was recovery day. Other than warm up and cool down, there wasn't any "long and slow."

One way the coaches kept from overloading us too much was to vary the stroke. Even though I was purely a freestyler in competition, every practice included some training in the other strokes. While it was never the primary focus, on Tuesdays and Thursdays off-strokes were emphasized more.

When it was obvious the majority of us were so broken down we wouldn't really benefit much from pounding out more yardage, the coach would cut workout short and substitute starts and turns practice, video work, long rest sprints off the blocks, relays, or even a game of Sharks and Minnows in the diving well. (Sharks and Minnows with a group that included 10 current or future All Americans was brutal....as was the occasional game of dodge ball we'd play after a weight workout!). That was a once-every-few-weeks occasion, though, not a regularly scheduled event.


I'm swimming 5-6 days a week now, if only 2-4k per workout. "Distance days" are sets of 20-30 100's, 125's, or 150's on 15-20 seconds rest, all at current 1000 (and hope-to-eventually-be 1650) race pace. Non-distance days I work on butterfly and sprints (12-20 x 25 on 15-25 seconds rest @ 100 race pace).

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"They're made of latex, not nitroglycerin"

Former CIS/USport level (Canadian University). I was a 100-200 Fly, 200-400 Free guy and swam the 800 / 1500 a lot. Spent at least 60-70 % of my time in the distance group. 70 to 80 000 metres was pretty normal. Heavy weeks / camps we did 90-100k.

Our weeks were double Mon, Tues, Wed, Fri & pm only on Thursday, Saturday AM for 2.5 hours. Weights after pm swims on M/W/F and core/dynamic strength (med balls etc) after pm on T/Th.

AM swims on M/W/F were scm and distance oriented. Usually 200s, 300s, 400s although sets like 5x800 did happen on occasion (like the 2 weeks when Grant Hackett swam with us). We had a few 400 IM guys so these sets were not always a pure freestyle session. Lots of teams train 400 IM as part of the distance group. PM on those days was LCM. Not crazy hard but lots of kicking and shorter faster repeats. At least once a week we would have a pretty heavy pace set on one of those nights.

TUES Am was usually filler (LCM). T/Th pm was SCM, and usually some sort of speed work for me that meant fly . Sat AM was the idiot distance day. Usually long with 100s and 200s LCM, but we did do 8x1000 @ 13:00 once and 6x1500 @ 20:00.


Do you plan on a 5 or 6 days/week.

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___________________________________________
http://en.wikipedia.org/...eoesophageal_fistula
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_palsy
2020 National Masters Champion - M40-44 - 400m IM
Canadian Record Holder 35-39M & 40-44M - 200 m Butterfly (LCM)

It always boggles my mind what programs do at that level. Incredible! Since I'll be doubling my yardage and still running and biking I'll cut my measly 30k some slack. haha.

I'm a self taught, self coached swimmer and over the years have improved my 500 free to 5:36 off the wall. This is on 6/ week and 2.5k per workout. No warm up really, just sets of 10x200 or 20x100 alternating rest intervals different days and always hard. I want to take it to a new level. breaking 5 min would be great, but I'll focus on the process.

I planned on swimming six days a week 6x5k. I love the simplicity of my workouts and like the idea of just doubling it all or if I'm leaving a lot on the table by not introducing kick sets, drills, IM stroke, and general variation in the program.

use the extra training time on biking and running. If you really need to drop from a 5:36 I would tell you to get real coaching from someone who trains fast swimmers because there is a lot more variety out there than just banging out 10 x 200s. How about doing some 200s backstroke? your legs will hate you.

Congrats on getting down to 5:36 off the wall!!! For an AOS, you are really doing extraordinarily well!!! Shoot, with a taper and off the blocks in a Masters meet, you could prob go 5:25-ish. It's a long way from 5:25 down to 5:00 but I think you could do it by simply increasing your yardage but OTOH it is always good to have some variety as provided by swimming the other 3 strokes, and by doing some kicking, espec on days you are feeling tired from the last workout. Obv, you prob would not want to double your yardage overnight but rather increase a bit more gradually, perhaps over 9-10 wks. Eventually, if you keep swimming for many years, the idea of just swimming freestyle will kind of make you sick, at least some days; variety is the spice of life and, actually, with 4 diff strokes, 4 diff kicks, and 4 diff pulls, you have virtually infinite variety in terms of your workouts. For example, how about 10 x 100 as 25 fly/25 back kick/25 fly/25 back kick??? Or how about as 25 fly/25 back kick/25 breast kick/25 free swim??? Bet you haven't done those sets. :)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

30k is not bad for a Masters Swimmer, but that kind of volume for a "real" swimmer generally would only come in the first or last few weeks of the season.

In High School I was with a club team that did 12 workouts a week (Double Monday-Saturday, Sunday off) and maybe an average of 80-90k/week. Biggest week I ever did was maybe around 115k (Single day was ~25k - on my 18th birthday no less). That coaching theory went on a 4 week cycle with 3 building weeks and an adaptation week. For example:
Week 1: 75k
Week 2: 80k
Week 3: 85k
Week 4: 60k

I left high school as a pretty good backstroker and alright IM'er.

Got to college and moved to the long IM/Stroke/Distance group and got to be an All-American 400IM'er. 11 workouts a week in structured as follows:
Monday AM: 1hr Low weight high rep Lift, 1Hr Kick Set
Monday PM: 2 hr swim - aerobic swim, mostly sub threshold 10% above threshold
Tuesday AM: 2 hr swim (pull and kick focused)
Tuesday PM: 2hr swim Long IM/Free
Wednesday AM: Stand Up sets (i.e. 6x100 on 8:00 all out; if you ain't barfing you ain't trying)
Wednesday PM: Power Lift
Thursday AM: 2hr Swim stroke pull and kick
Thursday PM: Short/Speed IM work
Friday AM: 1hr Dryland Circuit, 1 hr Kick Set
Friday PM: 2 hour swim, VO2Max focus (i.e. 5x[3x50 race on :35, 1x50 recovery on 1:45])
Saturday AM: 2-3 hours of death (12x400IM or some such nonsense).

Typical volume was a bit lower, but maybe 60-70k peak during winter training of 85-90k. Recovery was interspersed in those workouts, but the week was typically structured for 1 specific output per workout so whole workouts as recovery were rare.

As a Pro, there wasn't a ton of discernible structure. I swam with a coach who would look at you every morning and decide if you were going hard, easy or home. There were more or less 8 pool and 3 weight workouts a week. Average volume was maybe 50-60k with a peak of 70 during training camp.

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I wrote this, you should read it:
https://www.slowtwitch.com/...n_Swimming_6700.html

Interesting that you swam lower volume/higher intensity as you progressed from HS to college to professional swimming. Would you say that was b/c the sport as a whole evolved from the high volume days of the 80s/90s to the lower volume/higher intensity of most programs today??? If so, it would appear this evolution just happen to coincide with your swimming career from age 18 to 26, or about the years 2000 to 2008. From your contacts still in the elite swim world, has the lower volume/higher intensity balance remained about same from '08 to now???

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I'd say some of both.

I didn't have a whole lot of choice on club team, liked the hard but somewhat more moderate volume approach at Wisconsin, and as a pro with very specific wants/needs liked the individualized approach of David Marsh at SwimMAC.

I think around the end of my time and the advent of super suits fooled some people that you could get by on no volume all effort, and Michael Andrew and USRPT have perpetuated that thinking. But on the other hand you look at a guy like Zane Grothe who went from a no-volume program at Auburn to a High Volume setting at Indiana and is burning up the pool...

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I wrote this, you should read it:
https://www.slowtwitch.com/...n_Swimming_6700.html

Ya, Grothe is a great example of higher volume helping a lot. It would seem that volume would be of more import for D swimmers than for sprinters, though i'm sure a lot of 50/100 free guys would like to also get a spot on the 4 x 2 relay, so they would have to do more volume if want a fast 200, espec a fast 200 long course. And, a guy like Michael Andrew may have to more vol if he wants to swim the 2 IM in the Oly; the Oly being LC goes against his sprinting abilities as displayed when he won the 100 IM at the '16 SC Worlds. (He may have won this year too but i haven't looked much into those results yet.)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

https://www.instagram.com/p/BdV-bL-ha0d/

here is todays swim session...

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___________________________________________
http://en.wikipedia.org/...eoesophageal_fistula
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_palsy
2020 National Masters Champion - M40-44 - 400m IM
Canadian Record Holder 35-39M & 40-44M - 200 m Butterfly (LCM)

Thanks guys. Great to hear from people with so much experience. I will build toward my volume goal over the next couple months and include 1500 of the 5k as mixed variety ( IM, kick, 25 sprints). In the end I guess there is never some secret. Progressively swim more and swim harder without crossing the line. Assuming technique is sound.

Don't overlook this element. I don't know how old you are, but a sub 5-minute 500 would be "Elite" level performance in most Masters swimming age groups. You're going to need to optimize both conditioning and technique to get where you want to be. It's pretty remarkable, really, that you've self-coached yourself as an AOS into the 5:30's. You've got to be doing most things right. At some point, however, you'll hit your limit in terms of self-analyzed technique improvements. To tune the fine details, you're almost certainly going to need some outside expert technique coaching.

I recently went to a USMS stroke development clinic. One two-hour block of freestyle instruction in a group setting took me from 1:16's to 1:13's per 100y on my distance pace sets. I have a meet in a few weeks where I'll be swimming the 1650. I'll see then if that practice pace improvement translates to actual race performance improvement.

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"They're made of latex, not nitroglycerin"

I am useless in the water but swimming continues to intrigue me. It is not just the beauty of the sport but also the hard work and commitment it requires. Those schedules look crazy and I love reading about it.

Btw: How much did you guys eat back then? Something like horse a day?

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10k - 30:48 / half - 1:06:40

I left high school at 6'4" 165 lbs. 7-8k calories/day struggling with weight. I grew a couple more inches in college, and raced my last race at 25 years old, 6'6.5" 192lbs.

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I wrote this, you should read it:
https://www.slowtwitch.com/...n_Swimming_6700.html