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Given limited hrs/week for an MOP racer, is it necessary to focus on one sport at a time for a block of 1-3 weeks, with only maintenance workouts done in the two others, to realize significant gains? I realize "significant" is the subjective word here, but I would still like opinions.I think you'll get more replies if you start a new thread. I don't have kids, don't work 60 hours a week and have a girlfriend that completely supports my training and racing so I'm not time limited and have never tried blocks of training like that so I can't help you out. My gut feeling is that it's not the best plan because I think you would lose to much on the sports you're not focusing on. If you do 3 week blocks, you'll have 6 weeks of "maintenance" for each sport and if you're time limited that maintenance will probably be more likely a loss than maintenance. But I could be wrong and maybe others have done something similar with success.
To add to this thread, even though I don't consider myself a "serious" swimmer, I have gone from someone who couldn't swim 25 yards in 2007 to a 23' olympic swimmer (1:04 IM PR although I think I could do an hour right now). It's been a few years of hard work and very frustrating at times. Swimming doesn't come easy to me. I made my biggest gains in the beginning just simply working on form. That got me to the level of a 1:10 IM swimmer. From there, it has taken more hard work in the pool. Form is still important, but at that point I felt like fitness became more important than it previously was because I needed better fitness to hold my form for longer. I made another jump in ability when I spent a winter doing big volume and really focusing on swimming. This year, I've made more gains on less volume, but I've been doing a little more intensity. One thing that helps me out a lot is to have a benchmark workout I do consistently. It gives me motivation and helps me measure my progress. For me, that's a main set of 4x500 with one minute of rest. I add up the total time I spent swimming (so minus the rest breaks) and try to beat that time the next time I do that workout. Seeing progress is motivating, and knowing that workout is coming up motivates me to work hard in my other workouts. I do that workout about once a week, but I can get burned out on it so I'll take a break from it from time to time. This year I went from 28:32 the first time I did that workout to 25:51. Since swimming doesn't come easy to me, I get frustrated with it easily so having a weekly benchmark workout helps a lot, especially if I'm on a roll and setting PRs.
Right now I swim about 8,000-12,000 yards a week. I typically don't swim less than 3000 yards because I don't feel like it's worth driving to the pool unless I'm going to get in at least 3000 yards, which is only about 45 minutes unless I do a workout that has a lot of rest.