Why Is That Clock Missing a Hand?

The pace clock—that big, octagonal, white-faced moon with the sweep hand on the wall near the end of virtually every lap pool in America—is the key to your graduation from pointless swimming to smart interval training. Since swimmers measure performance in minutes and seconds, the pace clock has a minute hand and a sweep hand, but no hour hand. One minute—one sweep of the second hand around the clock face—is divided into 12 five-second intervals. The five-second intervals (:05–:10, :10–:15, etc.) are shown with both a red mark and large black numbers. The four marks (seconds) between them are black marks. Swimmers usually start their repeats on a red (five-second) mark.

The pace clock tells you nearly everything you need to know for effective interval training, whether you’re coached or uncoached. Read it to find out: (1) how fast you’ve swum each repeat, and (2) how much rest remains before your next one.

Use it as a tool, not a tyrant. Become too absorbed with the pace clock and you’ll allow it to grow into an unforgiving taskmaster. Swimmers who meticulously focus only on how fast they’re swimming and never mind the efficiency price (how many strokes, how high a heart rate) are really practicing sloppy swimming. But use the clock as a valuable tool to help build up your technique, and it will make all your practices more valuable. And more fun.

Total Immersion intervals are a little different from what you may be used to. Most athletes use the “i” word to broadly describe any training that’s tough, repetitive, leaves you out of breath, and gets you ready for a race. Work out, throw up, go home.

I use them differently. Yes, there are intervals that can prepare you for an all-out race. But there are dozens of others as well. The questions I get most often, and the answers you need to train the Total Immersion way, are:

1. What Effect Can I Expect? In Total Immersion swimming, the objective of anything we do—intervals included—is improvement of technique, whether you’re learning new skills, consolidating them through practice, or testing how well you can hold on to them as you swim farther and faster.

Building endurance, increasing speed, improving your tolerance for anaerobic training, and practicing racing or pacing strategies are worthwhile secondary objectives that you should expect from your intervals. But they are secondary.

2. How Many Should I Do? Decide this way: Do enough to give yourself adequate aerobic conditioning (a set lasting at least ten to fifteen minutes—including swim and rest time—in a workout of four or five sets). But don’t do so many that your technique or concentration suffers.

3. How Far Should I Go? Repeats can technically be any distance from 25 yards to 800 yards or more, but for stroke improvement, which is the name of our game, shorter ones are nearly always better. While longer repeats help develop endurance and pace sense, they generally undermine speed and technique. Shorter repeats (generally 200 yards and less) don’t have this disadvantage and can give you virtually everything you want. For greater endurance, increase the number of repeats and/or decrease the rest. For more speed, choose fewer, faster repeats and more rest.

4. Must I Swim All-Out? No indeed. First of all, you can measure intensity in several ways: percent of maximum heart rate, percent of maximum speed, or perceived exertion (how hard does it feel?). Higher intensity develops more speed and anaerobic fitness. Lower intensity is better for development of technique, for improving aerobic fitness, and for practice of pacing: learning to swim at the same speed for a long time, even as you grow more tired.

5. How Much Rest Is Enough? Your fitness (aerobic endurance) goes up fastest when the rest period between swims is one-half or less of the swim time, usually shown as a work:rest ratio of 2:1. Ratios of 3:1 all the way up to 10:1 are common in building endurance, and you’ll see them often in swim-training books. When you do, watch out. In Total Immersion, technique and efficiency come before absolutely everything else, so be careful that your intervals are challenging enough to promote fitness, yet not so tight you have to throw away efficiency as you fight fatigue to do them.

Work:rest ratios of 1:1, 1:2, etc. (equal or more rest than work), develop speed and anaerobic fitness, since the longer rest lets you swim them much faster. A short rest interval doesn’t allow enough recovery for an all-out push.

6. Are All Repeats Straight Swimming? Not at all. The variety is limitless. You can drill, drill-swim, or just swim. Use any of the four strokes you want to practice. Work on pulling and kicking with or without a pull buoy and/or kickboard. (More on use of these and other training tools in chapter 13.) Even make every interval different from the one before—descending sets, pyramids, ladders, etc. (More on this below.)