Currently in training most of my 100s are swum on a rest interval of 10 - 15s. So for example I’ll do 20x100 leaving on 1:40 trying to hold 1:30.
I was listening to an IM podcast earlier this week and coach mentioned that he had a good swim session earlier in which he did 20x100 leaving on 2:30 holding 1:12.
Whats the objective of his session? Is he working on speed (faster intervals longer recovery) rather than endurance (slower intervals shorter recovery)?
I guess what my question boils down to is should I be mixing up my training to take in both? Will I see benefit for a 70.3 from doing some quicker 100s on longer recovery? And then how long should the recovery be? 20secs? 30secs? 1min?
I do a mix. I actually tend to do shorter intervals more im my base periods, then when “sharpening” I’ll do more longer rest stuff leading to an “A” race. But i mix it all up in all periods. If nothing else but to break up the somewhat boring and repetitive nature of swim workouts… especially when 100% of you swim training is solo.
The benefit of swimming faster is to 1) improve your swim mechanics and feel of the water…so long as you hold you form and don;t get sloppy when you tire 2) present alternate training stress for further adaptation. IF you do the same thing every day, you won;t see as much improvement compared to varying your workouts in terms of distance, pace, etc.
One other workout for example I need to do more of, is to almost flat out sprint the first 200 of a 500, then try and settle in to a steady pace and get my breathing under control. I figure that’s the best way to swim a mass start IM. “go out fast, don’t get dropped”.
No, variation never hurts. The one guilding rule I tell folks is no matter what you do. 10 Include some drills in your workouts 2) don’t swim with bad form…it reinforces bad technique 3) don’t just do long slow continuous swims, even when practicing OWS. 4) (this could be controversial)… but if you hit a “groove” in a workout… go with it… go ahead and tack on a some extra reps to that set. when your “ON” just go with it. You’ll have a great satisfied feeling at the end of the swim. Its’ a good confidence booster. Those are the workouts you want to remember as your toeing the line of the swim start.
Ideally, longer rest will let you do the swims at a higher speed, and the key part for less skillful swimmers, do them with better stroke mechanics. The more time you spend swimming hard with good mechanics, the quicker you will improve. We all want to work hard but sometimes the best work is to go hard with long rest rather than plodding through a “tough” session of short rest intervals. This distinction is particularly critical in swimming because tired, less skillful swimmers suffer from a breakdown in mechanics which dramatically cuts into any benefits gained by just covering more distance in a given amount of time.
FWIW, I swam competitively and did do a lot of stuff with 10-20 seconds rest. But that was done primarily to simulate race speeds, and, I could hold near perfect form under very high levels of stress and fatigue. If you don’t have the speed yet, and particularly if your stroke falls a part when you are tired, there is much less to gain by short rest intervals than you can gain by taking longer rest and working on really hammering the intervals with good form.
I recently had to disabuse one of my young athletes on the idea of cutting rest intervals short. His reasoning: “I’m a distance swimmer.” My response: “Is that always going to be your excuse for being slow?”
Swimming is highly technique dependent. As you tire, form falters. The more swimming you can do with perfect form, the longer you’ll hold that form even when you’re tired. Take the full rest.
A lot of times I’ll pick a middle ground for rest and do 20-30 seconds and swim just above threshold pace. I’ll try and do them descending or hold a certain constant RPE. What I pay attention to, is when I use better mechanics my times drop. When I get sloppy I slow down. I can then play around with kicking rate, stroke rate, really focus on my catch or even do a couple where I sight the end of the pool just like OWS 2x per length (25y). A lot of times when I’m feeling good, as mentioned before, I’ll get in a groove and everything clicks. I can sometimes be 2000y into a workout to get there sometimes. Doing even a few very short sets of drills as part of the warm-up get me there a little quicker sometimes.
20x100 @1:30 holding 1:20s is classic distance swimming set. It’s more aerobic than 20x100 @2:30 and the goal is maintain consistency in your repeats. It’s hard but you’re not dead at the end.
20x100 @2:30 holding 1:12s is more designed to tell you where you are fitness/endurance-wise. For this swimmer 1:12 is perhaps their goal pace for a 1,500m (or a HIM). Going a 1:12 on #1 is probably hard, but going 1:12 on #18 is really hard. Early season that swimmer may breakdown and start holding 1:16s, but by mid-season they’re more consistent. The extra rest is designed to allow you to simulate a race-like effort across multiple repeats.
A set focused on speed work would be more like 8x75 @2:00 where you go 25 build, 25 all out, 25 recovery.
If you’re training for a 70.3 I’d suggest a good mix of the first two sets, but maybe some speed-specific stuff from time to time. Just keep in mind that the 20x100 on longer rest is a much harder set; you might do little else than warm up and warm down. Whereas the 20x100 on shorter rest is maybe a “main set” but you’d still be able to do a kick set before and a long pull afterwards.