TECHNIQUE TRAINING
YEAR-ROUND SWIM FITNESS
Pool swimming over the winter doesn’t have to be a season of repetitive lengths and counting tiles, says swimming coach Dan Bullock. Here in the first of a three-part series, he explains how to maintain your technique and fitness while you can’t swim outside
PART ONE: MAKING A TRAINING PLAN
For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the open water season will now be at an end. Whether that's true in your part
of the world or not, it's an unavoidable fact that, whenever your off- season, you will probably have to move your training to the pool. It's also true that you have to train through the off-season if you want to perform well next time you hit the water. Even if you're training with a club, it’s still a good idea to structure
your weekly and monthly training into cycles. Developing a training plan is never a bad thing when it comes to swimming – you can use it to check your progress, schedule in family events or business trips and focus in on key events. Following different phases of training at different times will also allow the body to adapt to a suitable overload of training and build towards geting fiter, stronger and faster. Since open water swimming races are generally 400m or more,
training is focused on endurance rather than speed. Yet it would be unwise to ignore swim technique and efficiency, since drag and poor form in the water are going to be the biggest limiters on progress.
PLANNING A SESSION
Keep in mind the following structure as a guide if you choose to plan your own fitness sessions…
Warm-up: 15 percent of the time available for your session – easy swimming to mobilise and encourage blood flow.
Subset: 25 percent used as an extension of the warm-up to build heart-rate levels or to introduce some skills that need to be done while fresh.
Mainset: 40-50 percent of the cycle – a sustained period where the heart rate is elevated with a race-specific focus.
Subset: 10 percent secondary subset might be added to start a longer, more technical warm-down depending on the intensity of the main set. Alternatively, sprints will oſten be added towards the end of a session/season dependent.
Swim down/Cool down: 10 percent.
This is not the only way to construct a session but it is a tried and tested formula. We might start a session with a hard, 400m timed swim to replicate the oſten limited warm-up facilities at an open water race as an example of how you can make your session a litle more race-specific.
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Photo © Jos Dinkelberg
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