Training Made Simple

The Basic Facts of Getting Fit for Swimming or Any Other Endurance Sport

1. Stress: Not the kind caused by discovering a bounced check or having a run-in with your abrasive boss. In training, stress simply means a workload imposed on the body. Carefully and selectively applied, it elicits a positive response: The body grows stronger. But if the workload is too heavy, the body can’t adapt. The result: injury, exhaustion, frustration.

2. Progressive Overload: As the body grows stronger in response to training, gains come more slowly. So we need to increase the load, as long as we do it judiciously and systematically. More frequency or more intensity—or both—stimulate the body to improve. The right training overload for your first month (or even year) of training probably will be too little to build you up more by the time the third month (or year) comes along.

3. Specificity: The body adapts to the specific stress imposed. So your training should be as much as possible like the activity you’re preparing for in type, distance, and intensity.

4. Consistency: Even if you can spare as little as thirty minutes a day for training, you can still achieve reasonably good fitness by being regular about it. Physiologists tell us that we need to train at least three to four days a week, year-round, to maintain basic fitness.(More fitness obviously takes more work.) Fitness can be easily lost in a few idle weeks, and it always takes longer to regain than it did to lose. So during a period when your training time threatens to dry up altogether, remember that even a little is far better than none at all. 

5. Progression: The nearer you get to the top of the mountain you’re trying to climb, the steeper it grows. The more you improve, the harder it becomes to keep improving at the same rate. You’ll reach 90 percent of your potential with a moderate amount of effort, and beyond that even small gains will come grudgingly. When you reach that point, you’re smarter to buff, not build. Polish technique. Swim smarter, not harder. The good news: The fitness ground you’ve already won will be relatively easy to hold. 

6. Recovery: Work and rest are yin and yang, inseparable halves of the same equation. You need to recuperate from hard training, to allow your body to adapt and successfully handle harder workloads— during a set, a workout, or a training cycle. You can’t push your heart rate near its maximum in a set time and again unless it recovers nearly back to its resting level between efforts. Similarly, intense workouts must be balanced with recovery workouts.

And Now for Something Completely Different

(Strokes, That Is. The Other Three, and the Good They Can Do You)

It may surprise mileage-based athletes like cyclists and runners, but swimmers can be as obsessed with distance as anybody else. And the obsession is just as bad for them.

“But I have forty-five minutes to work out, period,” time-pressed athletes grumble when I warn them they’d be better off if they left their comfortable workout ruts and started using more variety. “If I try to fit in all that other stuff, I won’t be able to rack up the yardage I need to stay in shape.”

But they can, and their bodies know it—only their brains still need convincing. Most people can train two to three times as many muscles in the pool as they do now, in whatever time they have to spend, and get just as much conditioning from their workout.

In 45 minutes, a determined swimmer can cover 2000 to 2500 yards of freestyle. Since it’s the fastest and easiest stroke, it gives the most satisfying total. Mixing in other strokes could chop that comforting number by several hundred yards, and swimmers believe as much as anyone else in the magical power of distance to measure a “good” physical workout. Farther equals fitter.

Except that the muscle you’re targeting the most doesn’t know that: The heart doesn’t understand or care what strokes you’re swimming or how many yards you write in your log. It knows only two things—how hard it has worked and for how long. So let’s compare the heart-health effect of two different 20-minute workout sets.

Set #1: 1000 yards freestyle (10 repeats of 100 yards), leaving every 2 minutes. John, a fifty-six-year-old Masters swimmer, averages 1:35 for each repeat of the set and keeps his heart rate around 120.

Set #2: Later John decides to swim a 20-minute individual medley set (all four strokes), but now he can complete only eight repeats of 100 yards in the same time, since he has to increase his interval to 2 minutes 30 seconds per 100 yards (2 minutes swimming, 30 seconds rest). Once again his heart rate stays around 120 BPM.

What did he lose by dropping 20 percent of his yardage on the second set? No fitness, certainly. His heart pumped about 2,400 times in #1 and #2. It didn’t care how far the body it was servicing traveled. And that would be especially true of the lower-intensity workout levels (60 percent to 75 percent of MHR [maximum heart rate]) fitness swimmers and cross-trainers stay on.

Better yet, you can actually get in better shape even as your yardage goes down. The secret is simple: variety. The heart may not care whether you’re swimming one stroke or another, but your muscles care very much. Different muscle groups do the work in each of the four swimming strokes—freestyle, butterfly, breast, and back—because the strokes themselves are so different. A freestyle set helps your freestyle muscles but neglects others. Want to work the greatest amount of muscle tissue? Swim all the strokes. You’ll be getting the classic double-barreled benefit of cross-training: better conditioning with less chance of injury.

7. Cycles: Steady, “submaximal” training is like putting money in the bank, establishing our base, our security. We write checks on that account with the demands of intensive training. Write too many and you’ll soon be bankrupt, your body will rebel and simply refuse to adapt (see page 175). And the faster and harder you train, the sooner you’ll get your body’s “insufficient funds” notice. This applies to individual workouts as well as training cycles of months and years. Adult swimmers especially should remember: Your “careers” may be measured in quarter- or even half-centuries, enviable to be sure. If you mainly want health and happiness, steady low-stress training will keep you injury-free, physically fresh, and fit for the long haul, week in and week out, year in and year out.