So What Are You Training For?

You can’t make the most of your training time if you don’t know why you’re training in the first place. Do you want to be fit and healthy? Become smoother in the water? Build a more powerful body? Win races? They’re all good reasons for getting into the pool, and they all take different kinds of preparation.

Of course, in my earliest days as a coach, influenced mainly by my own experiences as a swimmer, I knew none of that. No one else knew it either. We had a tried-and-true notion of what training sessions were supposed to accomplish: grind it out until you became a successful racer. If you could just keep the pressure on until the guy in the next lane broke, you won. So the coach’s job was simple. Keep the pressure on, keep making it harder, keep increasing everyone’s tolerance for misery.

The longer I worked with swimmers, though, the more I understood how complex the real training puzzle actually is, how desperately muscles need rest to improve since that’s when they do their rebuilding, and how training the nervous system to swim more economically is far more useful than beating up the body anyway. Suddenly, training split into a whole range of choices anyone could fit into. You no longer had to be a college jock in your twenties to be considered “in training,” and you didn’t have to destroy yourself every day to get where you were going. Because you could be working toward any of the following:

BASIC FITNESS: Is your goal to simply enjoy aerobic fitness, to feel strong and healthy with plenty of energy to get through the day? You can achieve that with regular 30- to 40-minute swim workouts, three or four times a week. Unless you’re gearing up for a swimming race, basic low-intensity sets will give you everything you want. And if your swimming is a break from hard training in another sport, you’ll get all the muscle soothing you need from this kind of workout.

TRAINING FITNESS: Fill out a race entry form, and whether you know it or not, basic fitness is no longer enough. No matter whether you plan to eventually suit up for a casual Masters meet, tough open-water swim, or first triathlon, your training program needs to become more ambitious. Training fitness is the ability to handle difficult and demanding workouts.

Training fitness is what you have to achieve before actually getting yourself race-ready. You must prepare to prepare, laying the groundwork for your race training, not just plunging into it. Successful training is a gradual series of small adaptations instead of a sudden overload that puts you down for the count. You’ll need to slowly “turn up the volume” with longer sets, longer workouts, and probably more frequent training sessions. And you’re going to have to turn up the intensity too, with some of that anaerobic work I spoke of earlier in the chapter. The longer the event you’re entering—from the minute or so of a creditable 100-yard freestyle to the three-hours-plus of an Olympic-distance triathlon—the more you’ll ask of your body getting ready. You don’t go overnight from training two hours a week to as much as two hours a day.

RACING FITNESS: Races are simply different from workouts. Most of us go all out when we race (after all, it’s a race!), but we train at a less punishing pace.

Technically, to set the record straight, there is no such thing as “racing fitness” because it’s too broad a term to have any meaning. What you need to be fit for is not just a race but a 100-yard freestyle, or 200 breaststroke or 400 individual medley. If you haven’t prepared your body for how—and how hard—it will work in the specific event you’re entering, it won’t be up to the task.

This is an easy rule to forget. Remember my own minute of race infamy? I’d turned myself into one mean aerobic machine over months of prepping for the steady and brisk clip of a one-hour-plus open-water race of 3.1 miles (5000 meters). But several months before the big one, I dropped into that 100-yard freestyle event which should have taken me about 58 seconds. Instead, the muscle mutiny that struck barely halfway through my ultimate 60-seconds-plus ordeal was a humbling reminder that if your training doesn’t at some point duplicate the oxygen demands of your race, your body will simply turn on you. It likes familiarity, not surprises.

If you compete at different distances and can’t possibly specialize in all of them, just decide which one means the most to you and focus mainly on that. The rest will have to take care of themselves. Even coaches have no magic solution to this. My best race is the mile, but I can’t resist a sprint now and then. So I do enough aerobic training to turn in decent mile times and squeeze in enough anaerobic work so at least my 100s aren’t embarrassing.

WINNING FITNESS: “Full tanks” from building racing fitness let you finish your event and go home happy. Putting power and speed on top of that lets you finish your event and go up to the awards stand for your medal. But power and speed are achieved a little differently in swimming than they are in other sports.

That’s one reason some coaches call swimming a power-limited activity. Drag increases exponentially as you speed up. Go twice as fast, the water fights you four times as hard. So you need plenty of power if you want to move quickly. But you can’t just go to the weight room to build this kind of power, because it has to follow the exact pattern of your stroke—and even be at the same speed. Specificity again.

Swimmers must build this with ultrashort, ultrafast repeats so their muscles learn to throw every available fiber into the job. Since high speed equals high resistance, that’s what helps the muscles build the power you’ll need them to deliver in a race. It’s like loading the heaviest plate on the bar in the weight room, only you get to do it in the pool.

“Ultrashort” is no figure of speech either. Sprinters do their all-out power training in lengths as short as 12 yards and seldom go more than 25, though they sometimes pile on even more drag than the water throws at them by using tubes and paddles. Longer-distance competitors build the kind of power they need just by swimming faster than their race pace. The math is not complicated. Let’s say you average 1:20 per 100 meters in a 1500-meter race (equals a 20-minute finishing time). Doing 100-meter repeats in 1:10—or even 50-meter repeats in 0:35—will improve your swimming power for the 1500.

Power, of course, is not speed, as I explained earlier in this book.

A powerful swimmer with lackluster efficiency will remain a powerful swimmer stuck in the middle of the pack. Remember Alexander Popov, possibly the world’s greatest competitor? He wins races because his stroke stays longer than anyone else’s, even at top speed. Hard enough when you’re moving slowly, almost impossible as you sprint. A typical stroke rate in the mile is about 70 per minute. In the 100-meter, it can zoom to 110. And since the distance you travel with each stroke (stroke length) falls off rapidly with even small increases in the number you take per minute (stroke rate), it’s easy to start spinning your wheels instead of speeding up. So don’t think the most forgiving place to launch your racing career is probably something nice and short. (A race of 200 to 500 yards probably offers the best balance between necessary training preparation and a race duration that allows you to do well by practicing the smart-swimming strategies we teach in this book.) Successful sprinters invest a lot of time in patiently teaching their muscles how to move not just fast but long and smooth too. The muscles that learn best win.

No matter where you are on the training pyramid, perhaps putting down your base or already way up at the top and sharpening your power and speed, the inevitable question is, “How much can I do next?” Most athletes without a coach to hold them on course think they know the secret principle of training: “If some is good, more must be better. So I’ll do as much as I can, just as soon as I can.” And in this comparatively injury-free sport, they may get away with it.

But it’s not the path to success. Progression—strengthening your body by gradually asking it to do more—is one of the most important fundamentals of effective training (see “Training Made Simple” page 167). But in swimming, with so much of your success coming from technical improvements instead of physical ones, it needs to be handled a little differently.

Conventional progression goes like this: Since a muscle continues to adapt only so long as it’s asked to do more than it’s used to, I can do all the biceps curls I want with a 10-pound weight and my muscles will get very good at that. But they won’t be able to lift 15 pounds until I push them. Similarly, if you swim a 35-minute mile every day, your physiology becomes perfectly adapted to the energy requirements for that specific speed. Period. To improve in any way, you must raise the training load either by increasing the volume (swimming more than a mile) or training at higher speeds (usually by breaking the mile into shorter, faster pieces) or decreasing the rest interval between repeats.

The smart swimmer needs to know how and when to rein in progression. In the weight room progression might equal progress, but that’s not always true in the water. The thrill of being able to constantly swim farther or faster must be tempered by the knowledge that, in most cases, you’re probably sacrificing your form to prove that you’re progressing. If that’s true, you’re not. Whatever you’re gaining in fitness is being taken away by the cost of a less effective stroke. I can’t say it often enough: To swim better than you ever thought you could, follow the method we teach in my camps and in this book. They’re based on establishing efficient stroke habits as a foundation, then adding volume or intensity only as quickly as you can handle them with no loss of efficiency.

Don’t be surprised if it actually takes more patience and persistence than just throwing a few more laps into the mix every workout or two, as you probably used to do. To beef up your mile swim, your challenge is to add only laps or repetitions you can do with the same efficiency (stroke count) as your best laps, usually your first few. One way is to increase a set of 10 repetitions of 100 yards to 15 repetitions, or keep the number of repetitions at 10 but increase each repeat to 150 yards, while holding the same average stroke count. Another technique is to keep the total yardage of your set the same but cut the rest between reps from 30 seconds to 15, without giving up any efficiency.

For shorter-distance swimmers, the numbers are just a little more involved. If you do 50 yards freestyle in 40 seconds and 30 strokes, can you do it in 38 seconds and 30 strokes? Or let’s say your count goes up by four strokes when you speed up to 35 seconds. Can you find a way to hold that speed but have it cost you only two additional strokes? You’re making bargains with the water, and you want to make sure you always win. Effective trading of strokes for speed is what made Alexander Popov the most dominant swimmer of his time, and Matt Biondi before him.

So the results are clearly worth it.