Effective Swimming Workout Structure

Today we are going to help you learn few tips on how to create and structure effective workouts when you are not ready or simply can’t yet afford a full-time coach assistance and guidance.

Warm-up

Your body needs to be prepared for a workout to minimize the risk of injury or overtraining. This is important as both of those things will significantly impact your ability and motivation to keep coming back to the pool regularly.

That’s why before every workout you should warm up by simply doing a few stretch exercise and dry-land swimming drills which can be as easy as shoulder shrugs and arm rotations imitating the swimming movements. Then for your lower body, few knee bends and loosening your ankles and you are good to go!

There are different schools of thought when it comes to in-pool warm up but to make it easier and motivate you to do it you can just do 10-15 minutes of swimming your favorite styles just remembering to make it diverse.

Drills

It’s good to go straight to drills after the warm up to be able to focus on the technique before you start feeling any fatigue. Drills should be only slightly more intense than your main set. You don’t need any convoluted workout plan to benefit from the drills. You can just do typical drill sets like:
– 3 x (100m pull, 50m swim)
– 2-4 x 150m (25m drill, 50m swim)

Remember that rest period for the drill sets shouldn’t be longer than 15 seconds.

Main Set

Before you start your main set rest for about one minute. This is the most intense part of every workout in the pool and it should serve one goal every day. Three goals you should focus on during a single workout are:

speed/sprinting/lactate threshold
technique/strength
distance/endurance

Cooldown
To avoid injuries we are recommending you do an easy freestyle 300 meters set so that your body can relax before you hop out of the pool. Then some core work like holding plank position or side plank to improve the effects of the workout. It’s just as important as warming up so don’t forget about it.

Build your workouts with Swimmo

To manage your workouts and easily mix them up and make them always fresh and interesting you can use Swimmo Watch and App. In the App, you can set all types of goals (intensity, speed, distance etc.) and save them wirelessly to Swimmo watch. This way you have all of them on your wrist ready to start and measure the results as well as analyze your progress.

Kamil Market Development Expert at Swimmo

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