Do distance swimmers spend less time w/kicking workouts

It's been my observation that most masters swimmers don't like kick sets and many that do kick use it as recovery. I don't know about "like," but along the lines of your comment: I think many (most?) masters swimmers think kick sets are not useful precisely *because* they don't work them very hard. "Swim sets get the HR higher, they hurt more, so they must be better for me." It is rare to find a masters swimmer who puts the same or greater effort into a kick set that they do into a swim set. (To be fair, it is also still rare to find age-groupers who do this even with their coach exhorting them to do so.) I also think many masters swimmers simply get discouraged with a perceived lack of progress, or they think that they can never be good kickers so why bother. I can understand the feeling that the lessons of elites (or "mere" age-groupers) don't necessarily apply to masters swimmers with limited training time and reduced recovery capacity. But I also think that high-intensity kick sets can have a lot more "bang for the buck" than another swim set precisely because most masters don't do enough of them. Before doing yet another set of 10 x 100 on 1:20 (or whatever), think about doing a hard kick set instead. If you are always doing the same thing in training, your improvement will be incremental at best.

It's been my observation that most masters swimmers don't like kick sets and many that do kick use it as recovery. I don't know about "like," but along the lines of your comment: I think many (most?) masters swimmers think kick sets are not useful precisely *because* they don't work them very hard. "Swim sets get the HR higher, they hurt more, so they must be better for me." It is rare to find a masters swimmer who puts the same or greater effort into a kick set that they do into a swim set. (To be fair, it is also still rare to find age-groupers who do this even with their coach exhorting them to do so.) I also think many masters swimmers simply get discouraged with a perceived lack of progress, or they think that they can never be good kickers so why bother. I can understand the feeling that the lessons of elites (or "mere" age-groupers) don't necessarily apply to masters swimmers with limited training time and reduced recovery capacity. But I also think that high-intensity kick sets can have a lot more "bang for the buck" than another swim set precisely because most masters don't do enough of them. Before doing yet another set of 10 x 100 on 1:20 (or whatever), think about doing a hard kick set instead. If you are always doing the same thing in training, your improvement will be incremental at best.