Increasing Swimming Endurance

Triathlon Forum
1

Which of the following have you found to be the best way to increase you swimming distance?

  1. Set your distance and swim it using any combination of strokes you need to, and keep doing this until you are swimming the whole thing freestyle.

  2. Set your distance and specific combinations and swim it. 3 free, 1 any, etc. (for example)

  3. Use intervals adding up to your set distance, and decrease the rest intervals until you are swimming the distance continuous.

  4. Have a friend boat you to your set distance in an ocean/lake and then swim to shore. (I’m joking about this right?)

  5. A combination of 1-4.

I realize this is likely an individual preference matter (what isn’t?), but I am new at this (3 months) and am wondering how most folks go about being able to swim their set distance (or longer). I swim 3 times per week, 2 days drills, one day key workout.

If this has already been discussed in another thread (or even another site), please provide a link and I’ll read through it. I looked around but didn’t see anything.

2

Personally I am not the best swimmer, therefore do not have teh best technique. I subscribe to terry laughlin’s belief that you should not train struggle into your stroke, but should train smoothness into your stroke, therefore what I do is to go freestyle until I feel my form breaking down then switch into a balance drill to finish out a set then rest until I can swim properly again… I am sure this would be different with a more experienced swimmer.

3

The best way as Taku said is to work technique. Most college swim programs that I’ve sent swimmers to when coaching spent the first two weeks doing 4k of a 6kworkout on drills. I’d find a good swim coach develop and perfect my technique, which will increase your enduranceas well.

4

Might I suggest a variation of your 3.

Swim using intervals that add up to your target distance. Instead of decreasing your rest, just keep your rest consistent. Through practice, you will get faster. So your overall interval time will decrease, but your rest time can remain consistent.

5

Re: Swimming Endurance/Distance

Phase 1:

If your general level of swim endurance is low, then I suggest mixing in kick sets with your swimming. Most likely your kick is weak and this will help you down the road when you get into more technique, etc. 10x50 yards/meters with :30 seconds rest is a good beginning set. Same for swim sets (do everything freestyle for now).

Phase 2:

You should have success increasing your overall swimming endurance with extended interval training. However, before you start hammering out 100s you need to determine your training baseline. Try swimming 500 yards/meters at your race tempo (or as fast as you are comfortable with) . The take your total time and break it into 100s. This will be your measuring point for about 1-2 months. (=Point A)

Create interval sets by adding 10-15 seconds of rest to your Point A time. (Ex/ 1:50). Your interval set should be 2:05. Your short term goal is to make an entire set keeping each 100 under the 2:05. Start with 5x100s and gradually move up to 15. At the point that you miss the interval, take a minute off and then continue.

If swimming 500 yards is a bit much then start with a set of 50s. After a light warm-up, swim 2 lengths fairly easy. Add 5 seconds to that time (that is your new interval). Then, do as may 50s as you can until you miss the interval. Keep track of how many you were able to make.

These are a few things to get you started. Ultimately, you should get some instruction and a solid drill regimen. When you base fitness is solid, you can “drill yourself into shape”.

6

join a masters swim club… joining a team to swim with was the absolute best thing that I have ever done in terms swimming, if this doesn’t work, try and find a coach, if you are just starting swimming, paying someone to look at your stroke and set up a training program would be extremely benificial…
if you can’t do that…
do lots of drills, and lots of kicking…
I think you should do some of everything, I assume you want to encrease your free endurance, so I would do medium distance sets, and decrease your rest as time goes on… but you should totally work all your strokes, and play around, for example… (12*100, 2 free, 1 non).
increasing the interval amount is also a good idea… and thus you will slowly increase your total distance

I like to vary it around, I love doing lactate threshold swim workouts… so painful, but soo fun… sprint workouts are also good because they are the best way to get stronger… (ex… 5*(50 on 3 min, 25 on 2))
long endurance swims are important because they build mental focus, and because your a triathlete… (4*400 ~80% on 5-10 sec rest)…

but because most triathletes are pretty strong, and trained cardiovasularly, i would do drills, and get someone to look at your stroke, because thats probobly your biggest limitation now…
hope that helps

David

7

Well, since nobady else has said it, NUMBER 4!!!

If you really want to boost your endurance, have your friend take you out farther than you think you can swim. (You will either suprise yourself with your abilities, or demonstrate Darwin’s favorite pricipal.)
Good Luck!

8

… for me (and I believe it was mentioned in a prior post), improving technique improves efficiency. Efficiency improves effort for distance completed. Efficiency of effort improves overall times (swim, bike and run). Training with poor technique only reinforces bad habits and the resulting inefficiencies.

You did say “best”?.. If so, I vote for none of the above… and, (for swimming) improving technique gives best overall bang for the buck.

FWIW Joe Moya

9

#3 is the way to go, but vary it a lot more. Rather than just reducing the rest until you can swim the whole distance, try varying all the parameters at different stages.

For example, let’s say you’re planning on a 1km swim. You could start off doing 2050, and as you get better you could vary it by doing 10100, 5200, 4250 or even 2*500.

Now, could keep the rest the same and do 12100, or 6200.

Or, you could keep the rest the same, and the number of reps the same, but try and swim each 100 faster.

The more variance you can have in your sessions, the more likely you are to enjoy yourself, and therefore improve too.

10

Swim until you grow scales, fins and gills - alternatively find a swim squad and hit the pool at least 4 days a week. I have been swimming for 31 years now and the only way to improve technique is to swim excessively…runners and cyclists have a hard time adapting to swimming due to a lack of upper body stength - following a gym program taylored to swimmers is useful as well

11

Some quick background information to show where I am coming from …

I come from a competitive background (college baseball pitcher) where I learned 2 very important things. Proper technique = less effort and increased safety, and showing up is still the most important thing.

I am not concerned about running or cycling. Running I am used to and I seem to have taken to cycling quite naturally.

With swimming, I have been working on technique religiously since the onset. I knew about Total Immersion from a buddy pursuing pararescue, and that’s where I went to first. I’ve been using that system. I have had my technique watched by 2 swim teachers (one a masters swimmer) every drill day at the YMCA where I swim, and received good remarks from both.

When swimming 20, 50m intervals with 40s rest in between I log each 50m between 0:50 and 1:05 with 26-28 strokes per 50m. Decreasing strokes per 50m, trunk rotation, and “silent swimming” have been my focal points thus far.

My main objective (for this winter) is to get to where I can swim 1000m (or longer) with no stops and with reasonable ease. I ride 26miles and run 6 miles (zone 2 – LSD) and it’s no problem, but I am not finding the swim to be as accommodating.

Once I get to where I can swim 1000m, then I have no problem with driving an hour to the nearest masters swim and participating, but until then it will be wasted time and money (IMO). Masters swim 1000m for an “easy warm-up”.

I am not interested in hiring a coach at this point strictly from a financial standpoint. If I do decent at my tri’s summer 2004 and looks like this can be something I’m good at, then I will. But, I’m not going to spend $1K on a coach and $3K on equipment to finish middle or back of the pack. If I can prove to myself that I have the ability to consistently finish in the top 25% of my age group, then I’ll dump more money (i.e. hire a coach) in this sport to try and get into the top 10%.

If I can get my 500m swim to be 10-15min long, then my sprint tri time will be ~1:30 – 1:40 going at about zone 3 pace. Then I can start working on getting that time down. Right now, I have just been working on being able to “go longer” without exerting much more effort.

My overall goal is to get up to international distances in the next year 2004-05, and then see how I compete at that level. So, I am eyeing the “1500m-2000m” distance as my “working objective”. So, I was asking what folks thought was the best way to “get there”.

Thanks for the replies; I will try variation … maybe something new every week for the key workout. For my 2 days of drills, I plan to keep the same routine I have been doing (alternating 50m of different drills … thumb-2-thigh, thumb-2-armpit, kick, etc) with the addition of a few others here and there.

I appreciate your comments.

12

It is easier to build bike or run endurance than swim endurance. You have been training leg endurance since before you started to walk. Unless you have spent significant time as a swimmer you haven’t ever used your swim muscles in an endurance capacity.

Even if you don’t workout, you perform 10s of thousands of repetitions of leg work every day. I can’t think of any other thing that I do that is similar to the freestyle pull and certainly not the high reps involved in swimming. According to your numbers, in swimming 1000m you are doing 1250 reps per side. That is quite a load compared to what you had been doing before you started swimming. Imagine how you would feel if you did 1250 bicep curls even with a very light weight.

The same factors come into play when you take time off. I find that I lose swimming endurance much more quickly than run or bike endurance.

Practical tips:

  1. swim as often as possible.
  2. try not to go long periods without swimming. There is probably some research or coaching wisdom as to the optimum but a rule of thumb would be that if you are swimming 5 days a week, don’t schedule 2 rest days in a row. If you are swimming 3 days a week, don’t take 3 days off in a row.
  3. if you must trade off, it is better to swim half as far, two days in a row, than to swim twice as far, every other day.

Swim endurance is hard physically and mentally. Give yourself time and have fun.

My 2 cents,

Ray

13

Increase the frequency you swim. I used to be on a triathlon team (not a masters swim team), and we swam 3 times a week. When we were building endurance we were swimming up to 7-10k per practice (and this wasn’t divided in two swims a day). Of course this only lasted a few weeks at a time, but still.

Now I that I moved I found another triathlon team, but here we swim 3-4k maximum, but 4 times per week. I can’t tell you how much improvement I’ve felt since my family moved here. The workouts are short and to the point, lots of race specific workouts, mostly based around 1500m or 750m totals.

Our A race of the year is coming up in 3 weeks, so I’ll tell you one workout we’ve done.

400 warmup (the warmup is the key! and i’m not revealing the secret)

75x20 (25-fist-freestyle, 25-breathe every 7 strokes, 25-IM order ): 20 seconds rest

150x10 (100 moderate pace, 50 strong, all freestyle): 10 seconds rest

100 Easy choice

100 free all out

100 easy easy.

Btw Russian coaches who went to school in Russia are usually (in my experience) great.

14

Last fall I couldn’t swim more than 200 meters at a time before I needed to catch my breath. I spent the winter swimming twice a week for 45 - 60 minutes each time doing various types of intervals. My workout always involved a warm-up of about 10 minutes, a main set that varied and a cool-down of 5 to 10 minutes. I always did the intervals with enough rest so that my form didn’t suffer too much. Every 8 weeks or so I’d do a long easy swim to see where my endurance was. It took a long time, but by January I could swim about 700 meters straight and by April I was swimming a full 2k. I completed a 1/2 IM last July with an acceptable time (acceptable for me, anyways! 43 min).

One thing to keep in mind is that I found the swimming endurance doesn’t jump distance at an expected rate. I found that I went from only being able to do 200 or 300 m at a time right to doing 700 m at a time. Maybe that’s because I wasn’t doing long, easy swims all the time, but don’t get discouraged if you don’t see progress right away. You might see a big jump in endurance after a couple of months, rather than small steps.

By the way, my 2 favorite workouts are ladders (50m; 100m; 150m; 200m; 150m; 100m; 50m) with appropriate rest in between and mixed pace 200 m (swim 200 m continuously, but mix up the pace for each 50 m where you first swim easy / med / hard / easy and then med / easy / hard / easy etc. I felt the mixed pace really taught me how to recover while still swimming. You can also do the mixed pace with 100’s or 150’s.

Good luck with it.

D.

15

For me. #1 and # 3

16

#6) Run more

#7) Run even more than you did in #6

Swimming is all about technique. Once you get the technique through drills and more drills combined with relatively short intervals (50-100s), your aerobic endurance will then allow you to swim longer distances at lower heartrates. Swimming does not progress like running or biking. You will find yourself out of breath after 500 yards for about 8 weeks and then one week, after you have been grooving technique through drills, you might find yourself pulling off a 1500 main set with little effort.

So swim and drill until you are tired and your technique breaks down, and then get out of the pool, dry off and go for a run. Concentrating too much on distance runs contrary to building swimming endurance - until you are a strong swimmer, that is. If you get winded after 600 yards, then every stroke after that is grooving a poor technique. Let it come to you. Get comfortable and the only thing that will keep you from swimming a 3000 yard set will be your dinner date. Good luck.

Steve