WRITE YOUR OWN POOL SWIM SESSION

It’s January!!! I love swimming in the lead up to Christmas, the pools are always empty. I don’t like swimming in January…but it’s the start of the year and lots of people have over indulged during the festive period and are now ‘back on it’. It is a great time to start the years fitness regime.

So I’m quickly going to look at how to write your own session. A guide to the basics. I write a weekly session for our newsletter and this is a good place to start, as it will give you a few ideas and you can look at the structure of a session. I’ll also give you some ideas below.

You should always tailor a session to your needs but just watch out that you don’t get lazy and repeat yourself too much. This is where a touch of boredom will come into the sessions and you may start to lose motivation.

TAILOR THE SESSION

Simply avoid anything that sets off injury problems, anything that doesn’t work for you, causes pain. Distances should be tailored to your needs. Make sure you also mix distances up a little. Generally, a more intense session should cover less overall distance, a less intense session should cover a greater distance overall. You have any slight injuries or you’re following a hard running session or gym session you can include more leg work or pull out the pull buoy…

The distances of each session and/or intensity may also vary depending on what you’re training for, or towards. If you’re training towards a specific event, you’re training should obviously trail off and lose intensity towards the ‘big event’, with a tapering period directly before the race.

MIX UP YOUR STROKES

The aim of your pool swimming might be to swim front crawl in the open water. Whilst that’s your aim, it’s still really important to mix up your strokes. To work lots of different muscle groups (particularly backstroke). Imagine going to the gym and only ever working your arms and chest. Whilst your arms and chest are nice and strong, your shoulders, back, abs, legs etc and comparatively quite weak. Eventually you’ll start to have problems as your back (for example), can’t take the heavy loads that your chest and arms can. Swimming only front crawl or the vast majority of your sessions front crawl can lead to injury problems.

TIME IN THE WATER

Might be dictated by the public session availability, other people in the lane, work commitments, family commitments… Try and sit down each work, figure out when you can swim and then base the swim session around those factors. You can also look at other types of training and when you may need some recovery time. A less intense pool session could well follow a hard gym session, for example. You may also cover a shorter, sprint set when you only have 45 minutes available in the pool (a lunch time swim or something similar).

SWIM STRUCTURE

WARM UP - always start with a warm up. I like including drills at the start of the warm up, two birds, one stone. You’ll need to increase the intensity towards the end of the warm up, so start with drills and then move on. Idea of the warm up, like any other sport is to warm the muscles and get the body ready for action. This can be done as one long distance, broken up into a ’set’ where you’ll gradually increase the intensity…

MAIN SET - generally the main effort and is the section of the session that covers the most distance. The main set can be broken up into two parts, with a ‘rest’ section in the middle.

REST PERIODS - generally depends on the set your doing and the purpose of the set. If you’re doing ‘quality’ work and hard efforts you may give yourself a bit more rest. If your aim is to produce lactic acid and improve your lactic tolerance, you will give yourself a shorter rest period.

Going off a ‘set-time’ ie. if you swim 100m in a session at around 1 min 40 seconds, you could swim 10 x 100m on 2 minutes, so if you swim a 1.40 you’ll have 20 secs rest before going again, 1.35 you’ll have 25 secs rest and so on. This is a really good habit to get into as you can’t slack off and it’s easier to chart your progress. If you simply give yourself 20 secs rest after each effort, you generally have no idea what time you’ve just swum and you can slack off if you fancy. Swimming off set-times also teaches you how to pace yourself. If you did swim 10 x 100m (and we’ll stick with the previous example) and you swam the first one on 1.20 and had 40 secs rest, by the last one you’ll struggle to make the 2 mins, as you’ve gone out too fast. Far better to consistently swim 1.35-40’s and complete the whole set. It’s really important to get used to using the clock.

LEG KICK - you may not like leg kick or enjoy it as part of a session but it’s an important part of a good swim session. It obviously improves the leg kick, technique and strength/stamina. If used correctly and well timed, a leg kick set can break up your session. Allow you to get some oxygen to the lungs and allow the arms to recover, whilst continuing to work hard. If you really want to work hard and avoid too much socialising (in a group setting), try vertical kick sets.

ISOLATE BODY PARTS - sometimes important to isolate the legs, arms, lungs, core… Include arms only sets and distances, leg kick sets, hypoxic work. These can be done as a separate set or included as part of the main set.

SPRINT SET - generally a anaerobic shorter set of sprints. This will generally come after the main set (as the body and muscles are warm and can take the higher work load on the muscles) but this set could also come before the main set.

COOL DOWN

Stretch it out, work out any lactic acid from the body…you’ll feel better for it in the morning. Again, I like to work in the odd drill. Saves time if you have any time restrictions.

EXAMPLE SESSION

WARM UP - 100 Single arm fc (front crawl), 100 Catch Up fc, 100 back, 50 fc fist (fist is a fc drill).

MAIN SET - 12 x 100 fc as…10 x 100 fc on 1.45, last 2 x 100 back stroke on 2 mins. *mix up your strokes

KICK - 6 x 50 fc leg kick, with float. 20 secs rest *allows upper body rest before sprints

SPRINTS 18 x 25 sprints, 5-6 secs rest after each. First 10 fc, last 8 choice. *Builds lactic acid and speed

100 easy back *mini-cool down

ARMS - 2 x 100 arms only, with pull buoy and hand paddles *isolate body parts/elements

COOL DOWN - 150 easy back/breaststroke

*The above is a fairly straight forward session. Remember to tailor the session. You could for example, tweak the main set rest period and reduce 3 x 100 (so 9 x 100 in total), if the overall distance or the session was too much. Alternatively, you could add and cover 16 x 100…

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS ARTICLE, YOU MAY ALSO FIND OUR ‘IDIOTS GUIDE TO POOL SWIMMING’ USEFUL - CLICK HERE