Swimming

Sorry for not getting back to you guys yesterday as I said I would, but I ended up being out much later than I expected and by the time I was home and had eaten, I needed to crash.  But either way, I'm here now and let me tell you - it felt GREAT being back in the water.


I will detail the workout below, but overall, when you start a swimming workout you want to focus on two things - technique and rest timing.  Obviously technique is an obvious choice because you want to make sure that once you get better and better at swimming which will result in you swimming more and more distance that you are doing so in the most efficient way.  Rest timing may be new to a lot of people.  People who have any experience with competition swimming know that practices use a lot of timing; you're swimming 100's on the 1:30 or sets of 50's on a 5 second descending interval, etc.  Instead of swimming laps on a certain interval when you just start swimming, I would suggest using a rest interval or a certain amount of rest you take inbetween each set.  That way, no matter how fast or slow you end up going, you still have that rest.  You can switch over to interval timing after you've built up more endurance and become more consistent.

For those of you unfamiliar, one length of the pool is typically 25 yards in US league swimming (25 meters in international swimming).  Therefore, one length of the pool is called a "25," two lengths a "50," four lengths a "100" and so on.

Our Workout:
200 Warm Up (free, back, breast)
5 x 50s easy
10 x 25s drill (3-5 kicks)
5 x 100 IMs
10 x 25s drill (catch up)
5 x 50s stroke down, freestyle back
10 x 25s drill (finger tip drag)
10 x 50s hard down, stroke back
200 cool down
Total: 2650 yds (1.51 miles)

The great part about swimming is that your muscles are not tight when you're finished.  The technique of swimming forces you to use your muscles at extended positions, which continually keeps your muscles from balling up which can happen when lifting, running, biking, etc.  Both Collin and I came out of the water feeling a little like Jello, but it is a good feeling.

Due to an extended interview I have today, our second swimming workout is going to be pushed to after 8pm tonight.  The gym is only open until 11pm and yesterday's workout lasted 2.5 hours, so I will have to shorten todays workout a bit.  I will tell you tomorrow how it went.