Got any of your fav main sets you want to share? Going through a bit of a change with pool availability coaching that is putting me on my own more and more. Figured it's time I get some different material in my head anyway.

Note I'm not a superhuman freak ready to do 10k sessions like some of you Frankenbeasts. I like about 12-1500 of warm up/500 cool down and maybe 1500 of swimming/500 kicking at most main set. I focus on the 50/100 fly and free.

Thanks for any of your sadistic sets! I'm also not afraid of kicking either I love it so feel free to punish my legs too please.

If you're doing 12-1500 of warmup, you're wasting 700-1000 of valuable workout. You're saying that you are doing over 50% of your yardage in warmups and cooldown.

John

If you're doing 12-1500 of warmup, you're wasting 700-1000 of valuable workout. You're saying that you are doing over 50% of your yardage in warmups and cooldown.

John

x2 The best set advice anyone can give you is to tailor down your warm-up. No need to warm up that much. My max warm-up is 600m. If you are running and doing 400-800m repeats on the track, wouldn't go out and run 4-6 miles to warm up first. Doing so is just taking away valuable energy and time you could be putting into a larger focused main set, which is the whole purpose of the workout. Hence the term "Main set."

I don't know how fast you are, but for a 1500 main set that caters to a sprint flier and freestyler could be;
7

X
50 fly on a minute
50 dolphin on 2 minutes
50 free on a minute
50 flutter on 2 minutes

These would be my intervals, as they would give me just about 100% rest for the 50's swim and a little more for the kicks. So enough to recover just enough to be able to go again at about 100 to 200 pace. You could also dog the kicks a bit if you start to get too gassed, and just use them as more recovery. I have done this set a few times and it goes by pretty fast. I usually do 10X though, but you can adjust for whatever main set yardage you need to get in..

And for me i do a descending set, but i'm more of a distance guy, do the 200 fly and 400 IM. I imagine sprinters will go a bit quicker in the beginning and try and hold 100 pace throughout. Or i guess you could do it like i do and descend down to 50 pace too, that would be a good sprinter set.

I really appreciate the advice, but I just don't have very good sprint workouts with warm ups shorter than that. It was fine when I was doing threshold longer stuff, but it takes me forever to get warm for sprint level work. 1000 skip and a mix of some 25's and 50's get my motor warmed up really well.

Back when I was sprint training it would look something like this: 1500-1800 warmup some easy some pretty fast. But most easy.

5-8 minute stretch / really it was to get ready to start the hurting.

8 x 12.5m dolphin kicks at 100 percent with 37.5 active recovery. On maybe 2:00

2 50s at 100 percent - ideally from the blocks with active recovery.

Some hard 25s kick and dolphin kick.

Long warm down at moderate pace. Not easy pace.

That is not the way it works for sprinting. my experience, 1500m is even on the short side of things. It does take awhile to get the body ready for quality work. On the other hand, I m a big fan of cutting the warm up short with doing long aerobic sessions....that, you can get away with little or not warm up at all.