Swim workout - more or less rest?

Triathlon Forum
21

Today I did 5x400 scy on 5:50 in the pool. Last week I did the same workout on 6. I’m wondering if it’s better to have more rest, but go slightly faster, or take less rest and sacrafice a little speed. The way it worked out, I was actually faster this week with less rest (5:25, :24, :19, :15, :12) vs. last week (5:25, :23, :21, :18, :15), but I don’t think that will always be the case - I was feeling good today for whatever reason.

My big race for the year is IMWI and I’m hoping to go sub 60 (I’m a 30 minute half swimmer, 62 and feeling fresh in my only IM). I’m guessing both workouts might serve a purpose, but is either of them going to help me more than the other. Or should I include both types of workouts, alternating weeks? Thanks for any thoughts.

Dan

Dan,
I’m sorry for hijacking your thread. The least I can do is to respond to your question.

The good news is that you still have tons of room for improvement. Don’t listen to the limits others impose on you. I would recommend you do the following 4 workouts each week for the rest of the season.

Workout 1 = 3x500 on 7:00. You want to hold your best average pace for the 500s. You also do not want to fade too much throughout the set. Based on your 400s, I would like to see you go sub 6:40 on all 3.

Workout 2 = 10 to 20 x 100 on an interval which gives you 30 seconds rest. You want to hold “best average”. I would imagine you would be around 1:12/100 for a set of 10x100 on this day. You might not be ready to do 20 of these right now, so just start with 10. After you finish the 10, then swim 1000 straight. It doesn’t have to be hard, just don’t stop.

Workout 3 = Repeat workout 1.

Workout 4 = Long swim. This doesn’t have to kill you. It is like your long run or long ride. I would like to see a slight descend for this set. Do something along the lines of 5x600 to start with. Add 50 yards to the repeat every week, and you will be doing 5x1000 in 8 weeks. The interval should be a short rest interval such as 10-15 seconds. The purpose is to keep you focused on the task at hand and to de-fog your goggles. You will not loose the benefit of the long swim by stopping every 600-1000 yards. Don’t stress out too much about how fast you are going. I am 100% confident you will get faster every week anyway with this plan, so you should not have to push this workout anyway. Simply add 50 yards to each repeat each week.

The key thing to notice here is that no single workout is super long. The main set for workout 4 will be over an hour, so that workout (with warm-up) will probably need 90 minutes. The other 3 workouts can very easily be completed in an hour. A warm-up of 1500 yards should be sufficient for each of those workouts. Something like this:
500 swim (easy, loosen-up)
400 pull
300 kick
6x50 build (nothing too hard, but just to let your body know it is about to do some work…sort of like strides)

If you finish workouts 1-3 in less than an hour, then endeavor to stay and swim easy until 60 minutes rolls around. Don’t swim hard, just get in a few more yards. You’ll probably end up with about 3500-3800 yards per workout for workouts 1-3. Workout 4 will end up being 6500 yards 8 weeks from now.

If you can’t swim 4 times, then skip workout 2. If you can’t swim 3 times, then skip workout 4. The tempo stuff is how you will get faster in the pool.

If you make this commitment, then you will break 60 minutes at Wisconsin. You will come out of the water super fresh. Building this swim fitness will help you to develop a strong aerobic foundation which will make you stronger for the whole day at IMWI.

22

It is certainly possible you might not be able to devote enough time to swimming in your life in order to be able to go 5:00; however, I am willing to bet you could have gone 5:00 in a 500 if you did the work necessary growing up. Most kids who drop out from the swim team simply do not enjoy doing the work which is needed in order to get faster. Most high school boys who are distance swimmers and swim year round end up breaking 5:00 at some point.

If you got to a point where you averaged 40,000 yards per week, with the right training, for 50 weeks per year for 5 years, then I’m pretty sure you would get to 5:00 (women 5:25 or 5:30).

Of course this assumes the person devotes a significant portion of his life to swimming. That is highly unrealistic for an adult who did not swim growing up, so you don’t see adults make this kind of gain.

I agree there are certain limitations due to genetics; however, I think it is very safe to say genetics are not limiting anyone from swimming a 500 in 5:00. 10,000,000 yards over 4 years (roughly 24 miles per week) will get it done for pretty much anyone. The commitment is the limiter, not the genetics.

40,000 yards a week at say an average of 2:00/100 (rest time included) comes out to around 13 hrs 20 mins of training per week. If swimming was the only event I had to train for, perhaps this would be realistic. As it stands, I have a 50 hour per week job, a 5 hour per week commute and I do try for about 49 hours per week for sleeping. This leaves 64 hours in the week for things like vacuuming my house, feeding my cats, grocery shopping, feeding myself and OH YEAH…training! It’s a good week for me when I get to train 13 hours…and that is devoted to biking and running in addition to swimming. So yeah, if I wanted to devote say 3 years of daily 2x swims so that I could get in 40,000 yards a week, perhaps I could get to the level of 5:00 500…but for what? That’s barely competitive at a Masters Swim meet, so what’s the point? And as you said, since I never had the chance to swim on a team as a kid, I guess I’m pretty well out of luck. So back to the original point: if ya ain’t at the point where you can swim 5:00 500, it certainly ain’t gonna happen at age 37 for me!

'Nuff said

23

I have a question for you or for other swimming coaches, can you tell us what is a typical progression of an average kid (or an adult) new to swimming ? So when someone learns to swim freestyle, what would be his typical split for a 400m, how much would that improve with lets say every 100 hours of training ?
Please use any other progression scheme that makes more sense, I just want to get an idea…

Its hard to really remember back to my youth to give you a progression of times. One of the key things is that not everyone follows the same progression. There was one guy who I grew up with who was always way behind the curve. He was just a skinny, geeky kid. He was pretty much the worst swimmer in our group at 10 & Under. He was a little better than some others but still one of the worst in our group at 11-12. Same thing until about 14. He always worked pretty hard, but he really started to enjoy swimming tremendously at age 15. He saw the really fast guys (ie genetically talented) work hard, and he wanted to be fast too. Once he started to love doing the hard work, his times began to drop dramatically. He went from being a 17:30 guy in the 1650, which is very very very average to going 15:5x by the end of his senior year of high school. I would say his genetics are probably pretty average, or slightly better than average. What got him to 15:5x? Hard work! I would say I was pretty similar to him; however, I just always loved to work hard from a young age. He and I both ended up with about the same times in the end. Neither was super talented athletically. We were both the last kids picked on pretty much every pick-up sports game. All we did was to work hard to develop our aerobic systems.

Our 15:5x in the 1650 is much faster than most people will go; however, it is significantly slower than what the genetically gifted kids can do. Those are the guys who go sub-15. I’m not saying everyone can go sub 16, but if you saw how un-athletic some swimmers are you would understand where I am coming from.

I think I went 1:06 in the 100 at age 9. Its hard to really remember the times from so long ago. In terms of progression, I remember going 5:11 in the 500 at age 13. 14 was 4:57; 15 was 4:53; 16 was 4:48; 17 was 4:43. In college I got to 4:35. As you can see, I really didn’t get a whole lot faster (percentage-wise) from age 14 to college. Part of this was I think I pretty much over-trained, because I just liked to swim hard all of the time. Another buddy of mine was the same speed as me at age 13 in the 500. He certainly had better genetics than I did, or he was smarter with his training and didn’t try to race every single yard of every workout… When we were younger, he was one of the fastest kids in San Diego. He goofed around quite a bit, and I caught up to him by age 13 when we went 5:11. The fastest I ever went was 4:35 in the 500 in college. That is decent, but it is really because I worked my friggin ass off from age 6 until 21. He went 4:19 his freshman year at Cal, then he had a little too much fun and never went any faster.

I was fortunate to train with one of the best distance programs in the country. Through hard work, our coach was able to get everyone faster. There was not a guy on our team who couldn’t break 5:00 for the 500. We didn’t discriminate. You just had to be willing to swim M-F from 4-6:30 pm and M,T,TH from 5-6:30 am, and Saturday from 7-10…thats it :wink: In the end it is pretty simple.

To get back to your question, I saw kids who went from being completely un-comitted and over 6:00 in the 500 at the start of high school to going just under 5:00 my senior year.

The progression simply follows the work…

Another anecdote, regarding the “progression following the work”…

One of our coaches in high school was Jeff Prior. Jeff grew up in the Philly/Jersey area, and he swam for Germantown HS with the notoriously hard Foxcatcher program. The program developed multiple USA-National Champions. Those kids worked really hard. He mentioned that after a few years of tremendous success some other swimmers started showing up, and they assumed they would simply get better by being a member of the team. These kids didn’t work as hard, and it eventually hurt the culture of hard work which had been developed in the past. Good, successful programs have a culture of hard work. The progression of dropping times will only follow hard work. Trying to say you will be X seconds faster if you do Y yards for Z years is pretty stupid. On the surface that might sound like a contradiction of my other post. I don’t think it is contradictory at all. I’m confident that 10,000,000 yards over 5 years will get any guy to 5:00 in the 500. I don’t know what that progression will look like in order to get there. Additionally I would hate to limit someone to think 5:00 is as fast as he can get, since many people who are not tremendously athletically gifted have gotten much faster than that.

Just like any sport, if you are training effectively you will probably see some good progress initially. After some time, each second faster becomes a huge accomplishment. Once you get to that point in swimming, you need to run some more :wink:

24

It is certainly possible you might not be able to devote enough time to swimming in your life in order to be able to go 5:00; however, I am willing to bet you could have gone 5:00 in a 500 if you did the work necessary growing up. Most kids who drop out from the swim team simply do not enjoy doing the work which is needed in order to get faster. Most high school boys who are distance swimmers and swim year round end up breaking 5:00 at some point.

If you got to a point where you averaged 40,000 yards per week, with the right training, for 50 weeks per year for 5 years, then I’m pretty sure you would get to 5:00 (women 5:25 or 5:30).

Of course this assumes the person devotes a significant portion of his life to swimming. That is highly unrealistic for an adult who did not swim growing up, so you don’t see adults make this kind of gain.

I agree there are certain limitations due to genetics; however, I think it is very safe to say genetics are not limiting anyone from swimming a 500 in 5:00. 10,000,000 yards over 4 years (roughly 24 miles per week) will get it done for pretty much anyone. The commitment is the limiter, not the genetics.

40,000 yards a week at say an average of 2:00/100 (rest time included) comes out to around 13 hrs 20 mins of training per week. If swimming was the only event I had to train for, perhaps this would be realistic. As it stands, I have a 50 hour per week job, a 5 hour per week commute and I do try for about 49 hours per week for sleeping. This leaves 64 hours in the week for things like vacuuming my house, feeding my cats, grocery shopping, feeding myself and OH YEAH…training! It’s a good week for me when I get to train 13 hours…and that is devoted to biking and running in addition to swimming. So yeah, if I wanted to devote say 3 years of daily 2x swims so that I could get in 40,000 yards a week, perhaps I could get to the level of 5:00 500…but for what? That’s barely competitive at a Masters Swim meet, so what’s the point? And as you said, since I never had the chance to swim on a team as a kid, I guess I’m pretty well out of luck. So back to the original point: if ya ain’t at the point where you can swim 5:00 500, it certainly ain’t gonna happen at age 37 for me!

'Nuff said

I’m not saying you “should” try to get there. I’m just saying that theoretically it would be possible. Highly unrealistic, given your current life situation, but possible…just quit your job :wink:

With that said, I’m quite confident that the 4 workout plan, outlined in a previous post, will help you to make a lot of progress towards 5:00. It might get you to 5:30, or even faster, someday if you were to follow that plan for a couple of seasons.

25

Dan,
I’m sorry for hijacking your thread. The least I can do is to respond to your question.

The good news is that you still have tons of room for improvement. Don’t listen to the limits others impose on you. I would recommend you do the following 4 workouts each week for the rest of the season.

Workout 1 = 3x500 on 7:00. You want to hold your best average pace for the 500s. You also do not want to fade too much throughout the set. Based on your 400s, I would like to see you go sub 6:40 on all 3.

Workout 2 = 10 to 20 x 100 on an interval which gives you 30 seconds rest. You want to hold “best average”. I would imagine you would be around 1:12/100 for a set of 10x100 on this day. You might not be ready to do 20 of these right now, so just start with 10. After you finish the 10, then swim 1000 straight. It doesn’t have to be hard, just don’t stop.

Workout 3 = Repeat workout 1.

Workout 4 = Long swim. This doesn’t have to kill you. It is like your long run or long ride. I would like to see a slight descend for this set. Do something along the lines of 5x600 to start with. Add 50 yards to the repeat every week, and you will be doing 5x1000 in 8 weeks. The interval should be a short rest interval such as 10-15 seconds. The purpose is to keep you focused on the task at hand and to de-fog your goggles. You will not loose the benefit of the long swim by stopping every 600-1000 yards. Don’t stress out too much about how fast you are going. I am 100% confident you will get faster every week anyway with this plan, so you should not have to push this workout anyway. Simply add 50 yards to each repeat each week.

The key thing to notice here is that no single workout is super long. The main set for workout 4 will be over an hour, so that workout (with warm-up) will probably need 90 minutes. The other 3 workouts can very easily be completed in an hour. A warm-up of 1500 yards should be sufficient for each of those workouts. Something like this:
500 swim (easy, loosen-up)
400 pull
300 kick
6x50 build (nothing too hard, but just to let your body know it is about to do some work…sort of like strides)

If you finish workouts 1-3 in less than an hour, then endeavor to stay and swim easy until 60 minutes rolls around. Don’t swim hard, just get in a few more yards. You’ll probably end up with about 3500-3800 yards per workout for workouts 1-3. Workout 4 will end up being 6500 yards 8 weeks from now.

If you can’t swim 4 times, then skip workout 2. If you can’t swim 3 times, then skip workout 4. The tempo stuff is how you will get faster in the pool.

If you make this commitment, then you will break 60 minutes at Wisconsin. You will come out of the water super fresh. Building this swim fitness will help you to develop a strong aerobic foundation which will make you stronger for the whole day at IMWI.

This is a great reply. Thanks for the taking the time to write it. I’m going to take you up on this advice and do your workouts. I’m going to make sure I get in all of the main sets, but for the next few months I might skimp a bit on the getting a full hour in each time. Like I mentioned a few times already, swimming tends to mentally burn me out, and I want to make sure I’m still churining out these workouts come August.

Again, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it.

Dan

26

It sounds like our swim abilities are fairly similar. Right now I’m swimming 1:15-18 per 100 scy on 1:30. With over 8 months until IMWI, I’m hesitant to push myself too hard too early. Back in 06 when I did IMWI, I think I peaked my swim in late July at Racine and I was dreading my swim workouts in August. If I keep my swim solid until June and then start to hit it good, hopefully we can draft off each other come Sept. 7 on our way to a sub 60 swim.

LOL, you sound like me. I peaked in July also, then focused on running/biking the last few months. I swam a 28:4x at a HIM in July, then just kind of puttered around in the pool the last couple of months until IMWI, probably averaged only 7-8,000 yards per week and coasted to a 1:03 swim at IMoo. It was to the point where after July I just wanted to be outside and swimming was ‘filler’ work for me.

This year I’m doing it different. I am swimming 2-3x per week max right now and will start to build come May-June so I don’t get burnt out in the pool. As long as I can still make 20x100 on 1:30 with ease only swimming a couple of times a week I will just keep it in maintenance mode until this spring/early summer. Although I did do 10x100 IM’s yesterday on 1:40, that was a cool set.

27

Flanagan - As the father of three very strong year-round swimmers and as president of our swim club I must disagree with much of your post.

You are pointing out the exceptions to the rule - The freaky kids who can just flat out swim.

For every little kid who can break a minute for a 100 or 5 minutes in the 500 there are hundreds who also train regularly and who are struggling to break 6:00 in a 500 or :35 in a 50, etc., etc.

My kids fall to the freaky side but I see and appreciate how hard many other kids work to obtain less stellar results.

So, genetics combined with time in the water and early exposure to the sport is exactly what makes the fast kids so fast.

David K

28

I have a question for you or for other swimming coaches, can you tell us what is a typical progression of an average kid (or an adult) new to swimming ? So when someone learns to swim freestyle, what would be his typical split for a 400m, how much would that improve with lets say every 100 hours of training ?
Please use any other progression scheme that makes more sense, I just want to get an idea…
This is a tough question to answer and I agree with what Flanagan wrote but just wanted to add a couple things. For me (and for other kids I’ve swam with and coached) I’ve noticed there are usually 1 or 2 seasons where they can do no wrong and swim best times every time out, every other season, it’s a gradual improvement. IOW, they improve a little at a time for a long while and then one season their times get faster by leaps and bounds. For me it happened the summer I was 12 (which corresponded nicely to puberty by the way) and the winter when I was 15 (I think the benefits of swimming year round kicked in here, I started when I was 14). My main point is that it’s not always a linear process.

29

Paul Yetter (current head coach of the venerable North Baltimore Aquatic Club for those reading along) pretty much agrees with you on that one. When he was asked about the talent/hard work spectrum a while back, his reply was that he felt like most swimmers could get down around those kinds of times, given good coaching and a willingness to put a lot of work in.

But if you wanted to be faster than AAA time standards, that was when you started to need to pick your parents carefully.

30

IMO, swimming 8 or 10 x 400, with less than 30 second rest between each repeat, at a fast enough pace that you are not gasping for air between each repeat, but your arms are really tired at the end, would be a lot better for you than either 4 x 400 on 5:50 or 6:00.

5:00 isn’t that fast for a 500 scy. The best sprinter on my HS team could go 4:37 unshaved and untapered. He did have some really good genes, though.

Jeff Prior was a workout beast. Incredibly decent guy too.

31

I admit I am outclassed on this one when it comes to swim knowledge. But, when AAA times are compared to the percentile based motivational times of competing athletes it looks to me that AAA is quite hard to achieve:

10 Under Girls Short Course:
100y AAA = 1:05.79
100y Top 2%in USA = 1:05.49
100y Top 3.5% in USA = 1:07.09

200y AAA = 2:21.79
200y Top 3.5% in USA = 2:2:20.69
200y Top 6% in USA = 2:23.79

Oh well, I am turning this into an internet argument. Yeach.

I spend a lot of my time defending good coaches (and average ones too) from parents who want to know why their child can not make or win State (or Divsions or Zones (AAA Times) and I have to point out that not every kid who works real hard will be the best, etc.

I guess that I feel like I have to stand up for the many kids who train hard and can barely make a BB time.

David K

USA Swimming Percentile times linkhttp://www.usaswimming.org/USASWeb/_Rainbow/Documents/e6732349-dced-45f9-919c-e90b7dd501d7/2008MotivationalTimes-Quad.pdf

USA Swimming Motivational Times
http://www.usaswimming.org/USASWeb/_Rainbow/Documents/b6f5e251-9707-4d80-92c8-c86992c20e00/2008MotivationalTimes-Top16.pdf

32

5:00 isn’t that fast for a 500 scy.

I couldn’t let this go. I don’t know the universe you live in, but 5:00 is damned fast for 500scy in the US for masters swimmers (which I think most triathletes are). In 2007, here are the numbers of men who broke 5:00 (AG: season/nationals), according to USMS:

25-29: 6/2
30-34: 6/1
35-39: >10/5 (all I could find was the top 10; 10th was ~4:58)
40-44: 8/3
45-49: 3/2
50-54: 2/0
55-59: 1/0

So, that’s fewer than 40 masters men over 25 in all meets in the US in 2007. Maybe I set my sights really low, but top 40 in the country across all these age groups seems pretty damned fast to me. And these are the swimmers, not the triathletes.

Now, you can make the claim that masters swimmers are all really slow compared to the fastest collegiate or elite swimmers, but it is the rare swimmer who can break 5:00 past college.