COME ON BABY, WORK OUT

If you observe these commonsense conventions and courtesies, every swim session should be an enjoyable, invigorating experience.

Now it’s down to the real nitty-gritty: the workout. Here is where everything you have learned finally comes together. As mentioned before, one of the things that make swimming so interesting is the almost infinite variety of ways it allows you to work your body and cardiovascular system. As you read earlier in this chapter, in addition to practicing the four competitive strokes, you can use a kick board to work your legs, a pull buoy with or without hand paddles to concentrate on your arms and upper body, flippers to work on speed and ankle flexibility, or Zoomers to increase your yardage at race pace.

Training Specificity

I have always believed in the importance of quality training and training specificity. If you want to swim fast in competition, you have to swim fast in practice. Swimming endless laps at an easy pace, the aquatic equivalent of jogging, will make you stronger and improve your cardiovascular fitness, and these are important benefits of fitness swimming. But easy lap swimming will do precious little to help you swim faster. To swim fast, your body needs to adjust to the demands that fast-pace swimming will place on it. The only way this will occur is for you and your body to experience those demands during training.

The Workout

Ideally, you should train with a coach and a group of fellow swimmers. But if you are working out on your own, certain elements should be included in all your workouts. Appendix A provides a series of sample workouts at three levels: the fitness or lap swimmer, the intermediate swimmer, and the advanced or competitive Masters swimmer. Each workout lasts no more than one hour. But these samples are meant to be just that. After a while you will be able to write your own workouts, providing yourself almost infinite variety and enabling you to work on your strengths and weaknesses, or simply those aspects of swimming you enjoy most.

Most of the workouts I do follow a basic structure:

1. Stretching. Especially for the adult swimmer, and especially in the morning, it is important to do a few stretching exercises to limber up your muscles before you begin training. Take about five minutes to stretch your legs, shoulders, and back before entering the water.

2. Warm-up. This is an easy swim designed to get your muscles warm and your body in motion before beginning the major parts of your workout. Warm-up swims range from about 200 to 1,000 yards. Swimmers usually mix strokes and sometimes include some kicking or pulling.

3. Kick, pull, or drill set (followed by an easy swim). These sets are done to allow you to focus on and strengthen particular aspects of your swimming skills. To concentrate on your arm stroke, you may want to do a pull set using a pull buoy—say, 5 × 100 yards with 30 seconds’ rest between each repeat. In addition, you might want to focus on your breathing pattern and try to increase lung capacity. If so, you can, try to swim the set alternating your breathing pattern: on laps 1 and 3 you may breathe every third stroke, whereas on laps 2 and 4 you will breathe every fifth stroke. I usually swim a pull set one day and a kick set the next. Drills, which are described briefly in Appendix A, are particularly useful in helping you improve your stroke technique, and even the greatest swimmers in the world incorporate drill sets into their workouts almost every day. After this set, swim an easy one hundred yards or so to warm down.

4. Major set (followed by an easy swim). This is the key focus of each workout. The major set will vary, depending on which stroke or strokes you want to concentrate on, how far along you are in your training, and, if you are a competitive swimmer, whether it is the beginning, middle, or end of the season. Accordingly, you may have only very short rests (5 to 10 seconds) between repeats (at the beginning or middle of the season) or long rests (at the end). The most important thing is to make sure that you put all your effort into each repeat. A favorite midseason set of mine is to swim 5 × 100 yards breaststroke on 1:30, trying to descend each swim. When I am in good shape, I will start out at about 1:22 for the first one, then gradually bring my time down about half a second for numbers 2, 3, and 4, then try to blast the final swim at about 1:15. Following the major set, do an easy swim of about one hundred yards.

5. Timed swim (followed by an easy swim). Although not all coaches feature this element in their workouts, I like to include an all-out effort almost every time. This is usually a kicking or pulling swim (say 500 yards kicking or pulling) or an event that is not swum at meets (for instance, 500 yards backstroke). I keep a record of how I do each time, and my goal is to swim the event faster than I did the previous time.

6. Sprints. If you want to swim fast, you have to practice swimming fast. This is the rule of specificity of training. Although sprints are hard to do, especially near the end of a training session, it is important to include a sprint set in your workout at least twice a week. As mentioned earlier, many top swimmers now do their sprint sets with Zoomers. Two typical sprint sets are 5 × 50 yards freestyle with 30 seconds’ rest and 8 × 25 yards free with 30 seconds’ rest, trying to hold your breath for each sprint. (As you get in shape, you will find your lung capacity increasing significantly. During a taper, you may replace a sprint set with a broken swim.)

7. Warm-down. This is an important, often neglected, part of every training session. Swim a slow, easy 100 to 200 yards to allow your muscles to rid themselves of the lactic acid that has built up during the workout. An easy warm-down is essential to eliminate muscle soreness. A study published in 1994 indicates that it is also the key to avoiding a heart attack following intense training.

Planning Your Training Season

To keep track of your progress—and you will find that you improve very quickly, especially in your first few months of training—you should create a plan for yourself, one that is as specific as possible. This plan should include an overview of your season (if you intend to compete), your interim and ultimate goals (see the last section in this chapter), a regular training time, and a realistic training schedule.

One of the hardest things for adult athletes is finding time to train. After all, we are busy with our families and jobs. The only way to handle this situation is to make your training a high-priority item, a given. Set aside a specific forty-five minutes or hour—whatever is reasonable considering all the demands on your time—and stick to it. Yes, there will be times when something comes up that will keep you from the pool—a sick child or a business meeting that can only take place at a certain time—but barring these exceptions, stick to your plan.

Ideally you should try to work out with a group. Swimming with others is easier and more enjoyable than working out by yourself. Many community centers and Y’s have Masters swimming groups that work out early in the morning, at noon, or after work. These groups are usually very supportive, with swimmers helping one another on stroke technique, pacing, and so on. But if you cannot find a group with a compatible schedule, train on your own.