I need some help planning swim workouts. I just started my new job and about to have a baby any day now (eek!!)
Training time is very limited because of that but I am super lucky (and thankful!) that I can bike from work to the outdoor pool in 5ish min. On my lunch break I hope to bike to pool, swim, and bike back in an hour.
So! Can anyone give ideas of a good “training week” worth of workouts. The pool is 25m and I hope to swim 4-5 days a week. My cruising speed is 1:50-55 min/100m. I figured this would help with how many meters I can get in during the 40-45min I will have to swim. I am training for a HIM at the end of September as my “A” race of the year.
Was just about to post that, I asked that a few months back. Took the advice of jasoninhalifax with good effect (until I got ill through over training but that wasn’t Jason’s fault!).
Short answer was 20x100m with 20s rest, which is what I did!
Realistically, you’ll be able to get in 1500-1700m of decent quality swimming during that 40 minutes.
I would structure all of them something like this, with the main set changing day to day.
400m warmup (eg 100s, 100k, 100drill, 100 swim)
1000-1200 main set
100 warmdown
For main set, you can do the old standby of 10-12 x 100 on 20s rest, but you may find that you get bored with that. Other variations are ladders (100, 200, 300, 400) pyramids (1,2,3,2,1), etc.
Mix in some kick focus days, some swim focus days, and some pull focus. There are a ton of variations, but the most important things are to make sure you get sufficient intensity and to work on technique while you are swimming with intensity.
I swim everyday at lunch as well. I found the “Swim Workouts in a Binder” on Amazon and have been using that. It has a bit more
kick sets than I like but it has good variety.
If you look here there are a good selection of waterproof books for pretty cheap.
Not a fish, but I’m in a similar situation with lunch time swims. I aim for 1500 meters.
Here are a few variations of workouts I do:
Workout #1 - Stroke it
400 warm up.
4 x 150 “IM” (Fly, Free, Back, Free, Breast, Free) This will depend on whether or not you have the lane to yourself, and can manage the strokes with traffic, but doing it this way, instead of regular IM seems to make the distance fly by.
100 Easy (get your heart rate back down)
4 x 50 “Hard”
200 cool down (I will alternate 25m Free, and then 25m Breast).
Workout #2 - TT workout
200 warm up
500 TT (get your time, and try to beat your last TT)
200 easy
4 x 100 (build… 25 slow, 50 medium, 25 hard)
200 cool down
Workout #4 - Breath Play / Kick Sets
400 warm up
4 x 125 (25 kick + 100 free)
100 Easy
400 Focus on proper flip turns with 3 underwater kicks and 2 good pulls before you breathe
100 cool down
Optional things to throw in to take up space / make the meters go by fast:
300m (Fly-free-breast-free-back-free - free-back-free-breast-free-fly) - This makes a 300 go by quickly.
n x 75 (free, back, breast) - where n is an even number. - if n = 4 then that’s a 300 that goes by quickly.
8 x 25 sprints on 30s. This get’s harder towards the 7th/8th 25, but that’s 200 meters that flies by.
Those look good. my only nitpick is that the 500TT should have a longer warmup. I would actually switch the order around so you do a 300 warmup, then 4x100 build, then maybe a 50 ez, then go into the 500. Nice long warmdown after the 500.
I wouldn’t bother with the 1500 straight either, but that’s up to you…
of course, if you are saying to build into the main set over the first 3-4 hundred, then you aren’t actually cutting the warmup, are you? I like to separate them though, warmup is warmup, main set should be hitting targets from the first repeat. No “building into it”…
i come from the joel filliol school of though. i see joel as perhaps the best coach in the world equal to brett sutton
we learned to build main sets…finish faster…
from joel ‘’ Don’t have time to do a 2500m main set? Drop the warm up and warm down.‘’
yes, building into it ''allow you to ‘‘warm up’’ but the point been, i have many athletes swimming with no warm up and cool down and the results have been very good. I never had issue with this and the injury rate is very low so i have no issue recommending this…
i come from the joel filliol school of though. i see joel as perhaps the best coach in the world equal to brett sutton
we learned to build main sets…finish faster…
from joel ‘’ Don’t have time to do a 2500m main set? Drop the warm up and warm down.‘’
yes, building into it ''allow you to ‘‘warm up’’ but the point been, i have many athletes swimming with no warm up and cool down and the results have been very good. I never had issue with this and the injury rate is very low so i have no issue recommending this…
OK, but that doesn’t change the fact that they ARE warming up. I have to admit that I generally consider warmdown to be “optional”. I do think it is a good idea to do it, but 90% of the time at masters warmdown consists of grabbing a kickboard and water-walking / floating 100m while we talk about movies / kids / beer night…
As usual, we are pretty much in agreement, just that you use different words to describe the same thing.
Thank you everyone! Any kind of build over the course of a couple of months? Is swimming similar to running and the different phases of a season?
Like, with running you start with base, build with longer threshold intervals, add speed and taper for a complete cycle. Is swimming similar?
For a triathlete, I wouldn’t bother with different “phases”. Just do a test set, figure out your target off times, train a bit, retest and reset targets every 2-4 weeks. There are a few possibilities for test sets, but one of the simplest is just to do a CSS test (look it up on swimsmooth.com)
Good intentions are one thing reality another.
If you are swimming in a public pool chances are you will get interrupted throughout your set, which is frustrating.
I trained that way in a public pool for a while and found a simple system that worked for me.
I would do a set that never stopped, in other words swim continuously for a set period.
That can be 20, 30 or 40 minutes. (and anything inbetween)
Made it a repeating series, one series was a fifty kick, fifty pull (no buoy) and a hundred full stroke. Last fifty at race or better speed.
Repeat for the full period. One thing I found with it was it gives you the confidence and experience of going without rest for the full race time.
You can change that to drills mixed with full stroke, there are endless mixtures, but the one element was, never stop.
I need some help planning swim workouts. I just started my new job and about to have a baby any day now (eek!!)
Training time is very limited because of that but I am super lucky (and thankful!) that I can bike from work to the outdoor pool in 5ish min. On my lunch break I hope to bike to pool, swim, and bike back in an hour.
So! Can anyone give ideas of a good “training week” worth of workouts. The pool is 25m and I hope to swim 4-5 days a week. My cruising speed is 1:50-55 min/100m. I figured this would help with how many meters I can get in during the 40-45min I will have to swim. I am training for a HIM at the end of September as my “A” race of the year.
Big thank you up front!!
I often have a 1 hour window (door to door) at lunch. I take 10 min to jog over, and have 25-30 min window to swim and 10 min to jog back and then change and be back at work.
Being in public swim, I just swim “fartlek” which ends up being a continuous swim with 50-100m sprints when I have a clear shot and then cruising for 25m in between or doing kick/dolphin kick without a flutter board if there is someone I catch up with too quickly. The swim ends up being harder than anything I would do in a half IM race (since i have to pace to bike and run after). Then I just jog back to the office, change and back at work. I don’t shower after the jog back since I do a quick shower at the pool to get the chlorine off.
I end up getting 20 min of jogging and 30 min of super hard swimming in 3-5 days per week. Pretty well all the swimming, I am gasping for air. All hard with minimal recovery.
Thank you everyone! Any kind of build over the course of a couple of months? Is swimming similar to running and the different phases of a season?
Like, with running you start with base, build with longer threshold intervals, add speed and taper for a complete cycle. Is swimming similar?
Like Jason said, no need to deal with phases in swimming as a triathlete, and really no need to taper at all for the swim in triathlon. Last race I did, I swam a 4k workout the day before. Still got out of the water in 4th.
Workouts - I like Jason’s layout a lot. The gist of it is going to be keeping the intensity high. Look around for some of MikenUltra’s posts…he is a master of swimming fast (like :51-:52 for 100scy fast) on very low volume (7.5-10k/week). Some of the workouts he gave me were:
2x(200/150/100/50) HARD on whatever base gives you a decent bit of rest (maybe 2:00?)
8x25 free HARD on an interval that gives decent rest (maybe :40?)
10x50 HARD on an interval giving :15-20 rest
500 free build with paddles
5x100 free moderate/hard on a “make it” interval
10x25 free hard with band
10x25 free sprint
*Each of those is an individual set (there’s 3 total workouts there). Just add a warmup and cooldown to each, and you’re ready to roll.
Someone to look for in the archives in Klehner, he used to post in the fish threads a lot, and had a lot of good short on time workouts. He’s much faster than 98% of people who post here, so the workouts might need scaled back a bit.
Hope this helps! If all else fails…20x100, :10 rest, repeat until you absolutely can’t do the set one more time.
