Curious how the fishes on ST build aerobic efficiency for the swim? Is it just a matter of swimming more often? Do people do base building for swimming?
the concept of base building is often misunderstood. it s not about doing easy training. Any aerobic training…easy, threshold, tempo, steady state etc contribute to the development of your aerobic fitness.
with swimming, it s very simple, swim more, more often, faster, longer etc. Put the time in…get the volume up. And include some quality in each sessions. Have a solid program and hopefully a solid group to train with. All those element will help greatly in becoming a faster swimmer.
No idea how others do it, but my approach is pretty simple.
Swim consistently, all year. I took a short break this year in August, not off completely, but lower volume, lower intensity, because the new season started this month and I wanted a little bit of a rest / mental refresher. But the rest of the year, I do the same basic things every day, every week, every month. I don’t periodize or anything like that, except I will do a roughly 2-week taper before a championship meet. (that’s a swimming-style taper, which is reducing volume a little bit, but ramping up the sprint work. It’s intense.)
Swim a lot, swim hard a lot.
Base training in swimming has a different meaning than base training in running or cycling. Swimmers do hard intervals year round - there is no LSD. There is LD, but they still swim it hard.
Thanks guys. Typically swim 2-3 x per week, 8-12000 meters. Switching from long course to short course this upcoming season with goal of going under 20 minutes for 1500