I have spent most of the winter working on my swim. I’m still slow, but I’m trying. I only get about 5 hours to exercise a week. I was planning to swim or run during the week and ride on the weekend.
My question is this. This morning I swam for 45-50 minutes than ran for 25. I did not know if there is any benefit to doing a brick that consists of the swim and run and not the bike.
Thanks for any responses. I’m still quite new at this three sports thing.
No expert here, but I would say any extended workout like that is better than nothing. Bricks are great when you have time constraints.
I believe I read somewhere that its called ‘blocks’ when you do the workouts out of sequence. Not that it really matters.
The benefit is that you are getting in 2 workouts that are using mostly different muscle components so you are able to do your run portion on much more fresh legs then if you had just biked. This will allow you to get in a more quality run session and limit added stress of a standard bike/run brick; however I think there is a benefit to doing both types of workouts.
You did 2 workouts, so that’s good.
in terms of hard ‘research,’ the best i’ve seen is millet+vleck, i think from the british journal of sports medicine. their conclusion in a nutshell is that you need to be doing short, high-intensity bike-run bricks and lots of em (bike-run-bike-run-bike-run).
swim to run less so, i think, if only because it’s not really sport-specific, and i think the same researchers have shown that swim intensity doesn’t really have much effect on output in subsequent sports.
all that said, practically speaking, i think most of us agree that cramming an extra little workout in there is usually a good thing, and if it means you can fit in a run where you couldn’t before . . . great! i say keep at it, at least until there’s time in the schedule to do a nice 6x 2.5km bike/800m run!
-mike
Most of my mornings are run first, then swim. Tomorrow’s probably the opposite, as I’ve a swim date at 7 am and I need to sleep in a bit!
It is fine to swim for 45 min, then run 25 or so.