Why is the structure of swim workouts so different than running or cycling?

Triathlon Forum
1

Almost every coached swim session I have ever attended has gone something like this:

W/up
drills
Intervals
W/Down

As a result, even now I am not coached, all my swims are variations of the above. Occasionally I will do a straight swim, but that is the exception. When I swim, I feel I get rapid improvements from intervals of 50m-400m. If I have done a couple weeks of just straight swims, I don’t seem to get much benefit.

So my question is: Except for a few, why shouldn’t all of our bike rides and runs have the same format? I know that technique is very important for swimming, and that because technique falls away quickly in the water, breaking sets into distances that you can hold stroke for is important. Also, intervals in the pool are a lot less stressful on the body than running intervals. But running injuries from intervals are not a factor of speed but of poor technique, which could be limited by working on drills/technique.
Since buying a computrainer in 2007, I have done a lot of interval training on the bike which has made a massive improvement to my biking compared to my years of steady rides. Running is tricky because it carries a high injury risk, but if you do specific running drills and keep the intervals manageable, wouldn’t it be better to do this than straight runs?

So instead of a straight 45 min run, your runs might look like this:

Warm up - 10 Mins
Drills (strides, quick feet, high knees, crossovers, bounding etc) ~ 10 Mins
Intervals 5x4mins
W Down - 5 mins

And similar for the bike.
This would mean that you work on running drills and cycling drills EVERY ride/run and do intervals EVERY ride/run. The intervals would obviously vary in length and intensity, but if this format is the best for EVERY swim session, then why not for EVERY bike/run session.

Having read many of the posts on weight training, I am in the “If you have limited time, then better to use it swim/bike/run than doing weights” camp. So if you apply that to bang for buck in training, if you are limited to 3 sessions per sport/per week, then what is the value of steady/straight sets when intervals,drills is going to deliver more for you?

N.B I am not a coach or profess to know much about training, so please feel free to shoot me down if my logic is crap!! :wink:

Will

2

i would say the answer to your question lies WITHIN your question…

‘most’ people that are doing some type of ‘swim set’ have had the experience of a COACH. you will notice that a great deal of beginners (see BeginnerTriathlete.com for reference) DO just swim straight. Those people have never had a COACH.

Now take nearly all us and ask the question “Have you had a CYCLING COACH?”… i’m guessing the answer will be an abundant NO.

The run is a little different… only a little. Most people again haven’t had a COACH for their running and those that have likely DO have workouts that you are describing, only once maybe twice a week.

so, in conclusion; it is apparently Tuesday and i still don’t feel like doing any work here at work…

3

A major reason for the use of intervals in swimming sessions is to allow lots of people to do the same session in the same lane, as they get back into sync with each other every rep. If they tried to swim a straight 1500m, it would be a nightmare with the faster swimmers unable to overtake the slower swimmers. You don’t have these problems on the bike, so there is no need to train in the same way.

4

Because swimming in a pool is so GOD AWFUL BORING AND MONOTONOUS that you need to do something - anything - to break it up and make it tolerable.

Note how you do similar with track workouts for running, but much less so on the road/trails. No need.
Ditto for riding a bike on a trainer, vs. out on the road.

5

there have been coaches who had their runners do almost only intervals, as in swimming, and they produced some fast runners and a lot of broken runners.

I’m not so sure why swim workouts are different cycling workouts though. It may just be that any kind of workout ethos works nearly as well as another and so tradition wins sometimes?

6

The workout structure is only different by choice. The reason you see big gains with intervals in the pool is that you’re doing intervals. They won’t necessarily help you go long (assuming average frequency), but they’ll help you get faster. Same goes for cycling and running. If you want to get faster, then do intervals. If you want to go longer, then do long, steady work. If you want both, then do some combination of both.

Training is only complicated by people that seek to benefit from its complication. A good coach will point out the simplicity of the methods, rather than micro-manage the subtleties.

7

What one of the previous posters said. Part of it is neccesity to get the max out of the facilities. Historically pool time has been at a premium, so you need to get as much work done in an hour as you can.

Also, until tri came along, a long swim race is 15 minutes, amd even a 4 minute race is considered endurance. For running, 15 minutes is very short for most and for cycling, almost no one does a 15 minute long race.

Finally when compaed to running, swimming has no impact, which makes a diet of all intervals possible.

Styrrell

8

Swimming is a different animal.

For me the major difference is that my swim session meters is almost at or above my race distance, while in biking and especially running this is not the case.

As a HIM comparison 2km in the pool is normal session, but my normal run is only 6 miles and my normal bike route is 23 miles. Now I might have a weekend runs or bikes that are longer, but the vast majority of my workouts are the “normal” variety.

9

  1. A lot of it has to do with the nature of the specific events in the sport. In swimming, there’s only one event that lasts longer than 4-5 minutes - the 1500. Most everything else is between 20 seconds and 2 minutes. Races of that length require higher intensity interval training. Same thing is true for the 800/mile. In college, I did ~3 interval workouts a week, or 2 and a race, plus a long run. So that’s 4 hard days and 3 recovery days basically.

  2. Running is just plain harder on your body than swimming or cycling. It takes longer to recover from harder running workouts or long runs.

  3. Interval work in the pool != interval work on the track. In the pool, you’re not taking much rest, 10-15 seconds max, plus a little more in between sets. On the track, you do things at a higher intensity and get more rest. The effort in the pool is really closer to a tempo/steady type of effort than a fast track workout, and stopping is more a function of keeping yourself accountable and on pace. Of course there are times when you do hard efforts close to taper time (like 6x100 on 2 minutes, where rest is equal to time spent swimming), but for the most part this is not the case.

10

most’ people that are doing some type of ‘swim set’ have had the experience of a COACH. you will notice that a great deal of beginners (see BeginnerTriathlete.com for reference) DO just swim straight. Those people have never had a COACH.

That’s interesting. I had never thought about that, but you are right. Friends of mine that decide to do a tri or swim/run, just go to the pool and swim so many lengths and get out. And you are right, I have never had a bike or run coach. If I was to take up the challenge of nordic skiing and wanted to do an event, I would just get some kit and start skiing. I know F*ck all about nordic skiing, so I would just ski a loop or a trail. I wouldn’t have a clue about technique, waxing etc.

Will

11

While I agree on the Coaching aspect of it all, I think another piece is that save for those who might train exclusively at the HS track, most running and cycling is done on the roads or a long trail of sorts where distances and intervals are a lot trickier to ‘create’ It’d be so weird I think to do intervals in my neighborhoods; the only thing that would really work would be hill repeats and the reason it works is because it’s a constant distance.

OTOH, swimmiing is done with built in repeats of distances which make breaking up workouts a lot easier. If i was swimming OW for all my training you bet I’d be doing mostly straight swims, but since I have the luxury of a clock, a predetermined distance (in my case, 25yds), I’ll break things up and focus on form and timing.

12

At least for cycling, a certain amount of long, slower hours are needed just to get your body to adapt to sitting in the saddle, neck and wrist pain etc.

13

“At least for cycling, a certain amount of long, slower hours are needed just to get your body to adapt to sitting in the saddle, neck and wrist pain etc.”

Your body adapts to sitting in the saddle, neck and wrist pain just the same if you are riding hard or easy. The same people I see doing long slow rides at the beginning of the season are the ones doing long slow rides at races.

FWIW, I rarely go out and just ride around, nearly all of my non-group bike rides have pre-planned intervals of a varying length/intensity.

14

Kyle, great point…I actually find that I have more saddle discomfort, neck pain and other small issues, going easy vs hard. When going hard there is less “weight” on all contact points!

I think the best response on this thread is Steve Irwin’s. Most of those swim workouts are designed to keep a group of diverse ability together and not swimming over each other’s backs.

Since I have to swim during public swim or lakes, most of my “intervals” are 400m in the pool (with 25 m or 50 m easy in between) or something like 6x5 min hard in open water with 30 1 min cruise. There is no way I can go to the public swim and count on doing a set “leaving on a fixed interval”…there will always be someone in the way. Then again, I’m not a very good swimmer either.

Dev

15

Most swim workouts are structured like this but they don’t have to be.

An example would be 4 x 15 Minutes Build on 20s rest. Most triathletes would prefer not to do those workouts, however. They would rather stop and sip water every 90s and only swim 45 minutes out of every hour spent at the pool.

16

Swimming = non impact
Cycling = non impact
Running = impact

Swimming events are also relatively short, if your biking event is an hour or less you could definitely get away with just intervals, however, like another poster said you need to acclimate the rest of your body to sitting on a bike for long periods of time.

Similar with running, except you also have to take account to the pounding you are doing to your body. Some people may get away with just tempo and intervals on a track, however, they probably wouldn’t do well in a marathon.

Regardless intervals are the way to go to get faster (for some people)

17

Similar to swim, your bike and run workouts should have structure in terms of warm-up, intervals, builds, recovers, tempo sessions or any combination thereof… PERIOD. The difference comes in the rest periods, effort levels, etc…etc… This does not mean track intervals, or smash it intervals, just different paces, rest periods, interval lengths, recovery lengths, etc.

18

Someone touched on it earlier, you are making the wrong comparison. If you go to a running track, or a veledrome on a training day, you will see all intervals for training. Swimmers train for events of seconds to minutes, so you have to compare with cyclists and runners that also prepare for short races. Even the 1500m guys might do a set of 20x500, just like a 5k runner migh do , 10x 1 mile, or some other similar interval session.

Now if you look at OW pro guys, they may do a 5k to 10k straight swim, like a marathon guy might do a 20+ mile steady run. They are not that much different once you put them in the right categories for comparisons… And of course they all do a mix of everything, but depending on your race distance, you will focus at one end of the curve to suit your [paticular race…

19

There are not many who can do intervals for 5 hours so at some point you have to revert to a moderate pace to extend the ride. I guess you would be the exception, hot shot.

20

intervals work well for bike training, but it’s difficult to find a safe place to do intervals on the road. Mostly I like to ride outside, that’s one of my main reasons for riding, so I don’t do intervals as much as would be optimal. Also, there is a dead weight of tradition that weighs on bike training philosophies…

as noted, lots of intervals for run training might make you fast, but it’s far more likely to break you. Running is weight-bearing which neither of the other sports is, and a lot harder on the body. There are hardly any AG triathletes who run enough to need intervals. Technique doesn’t matter much in running, either.
Three basic runs a week: a tempo run of 20min or so, done as part of a longer 40-60min run; a hilly run at moderate pace, 60min or so; a long run at an easy pace, where ‘long’ is as required by the goal race. Do that consistently for a couple of years before attempting intervals… fartlek is a better idea than intervals, do it some weeks in place of the tempo run maybe.