The philosophy I try to stick with is what is the minimum amount of training I need to give an athlete to achieve peak performance. 100x100 for a triathlete is way above the minimum and quite frankly for a swimmer too.
That’s a 2.5 hour set @ 1:30. There’s no real adaptation you’re driving past about 90 minutes especially when it comes to technique. Then on top of that the main thing you are doing is robbing from your ability to make an adaptation the next day.
a funny story that happened here on ST: An OWS was posting his workouts (on TigerChick’s monthly thread) and I was posting mine. We “almost” did the same thing
We both did: 2000 Warm up of various kick, swim, pull stuff
Then I did 6 x 200’s descend 1 -6
and he did 6 x 2000’s descend 1-6
So almost the same thing.
12k?!? Is that right or a misspelling?
right! I don’t know if the search function will find it, but yeah, 6 x 2000 was his main set.
Swim smooth is a good resource. Open water swim racing very important is sighting and drafting.
Lots of ways to skin a cat really. IMO volume is key and you can probably have a whole mix of different sessions as long as the volume was there. I’ve done a mix of squads and solo swim sets, with some 10km sets that were 1km/2km intervals on CSS+6, for example. Squads would be 100s-400s. Then some long ocean swims, 5-10km, good for working on sighting, drafting etc
I try and only use PB for recovery or WU/CD and would only wear a wetsuit for tri races. I don’t think you need to train in a wetsuit to learn how to swim in one, even if all your races are wetsuit races. You need to work hard and focus to maintain good body position, IMO PBs and wetsuits hinder that, I also think PB affects other parts of your stroke too.
For increasing volume, would you recommend lengthening individual sessions (I might be able to make my 60 minute sessions 30 minutes longer) or keeping the same session duration but adding more swim days to the week? Obviously the ideal is to get to longer and more frequent sessions, but which one should come first: longer sessions or more frequent sessions?