My question is should I start training every day or stick to every other day allowing my body time to recover between swims ?
After 2 months of swimming 3 times a week I am now up to 2500m over 70 mins sessions. I am not as young as I was and I am not sure which is best for my body.
I am now living next door to a 50m pool, H20 in Kelowna, BC, Canada. This is a great facility.
After 10 years living in Wales, UK where my local pool was unwilling to put lanes in for workouts. I am now finally getting the chance to train and get back my swim fitness.
Maybe try a two days on and one day off schedule and see how your body holds up. I really don't think you can make much progress swimming only three days a week.
I am 51. I swim M-F.
My shoulders are OK, but I still ice them down everyday in hopes of keeping them healthy. I also take quite a while to warm up. I swim 1000 yards nice and easy with fins before starting my main sets. Oh, and I never use a drag suit.
I can't speak to anyone else's needs but my own; I need rest days between swims to let my shoulders heal up. When I tried to go 5-6 days a week my shoulders were a mess.
That depends on what you are expecting from swimming.Is it for fittness only,or are you planning on competing?Is your goal to swim long distance,or open water, or are you satisfied with the amount per swim so far?Are you working on any other stroke then freestyle?
My experince has been like this.....
I used to love swimming 5-6 days a week,1.5+miles.Yes I was sore,but 24 hours usually allowed me enough time to recover,and I swam in the early afternoon-which I think helped as by then muscles that were tight had had a chance to loosen up.An accident that broke my ankle and a stern warning from my surgeon that my bones were "mushy" made me realize that I had done very little in terms of weight bearing excersize-for almost 10 years!When I was 20 that may not have been an issue-but the older you get the more important it is.Since recovering I have made it back into the pool-though I have scaled back to twice a week,and I have also consistently added walking,running,rowing and biking to my weekly routine.
My default stroke is backstroke and I usually do a 2:1 ratio of backstroke to freestyle. With the odd fly session thrown in.
I am presently doing a lot of kick with fins to get my flexibility and core strength up to standard. I guess that I could alternate some mainly kick sessions with mainly swim sessions.
I have the opportunity to train every day, so it is hard to stay away sometimes !
I'm a few months shy of 50 and have chronic shoulder problems. I've been doing shorter workouts than I used to & can now swim every day, sometimes twice.
I'm 52 and swim 4-6 days a week. Ive been doing masters for 22 years now. Like many of the others posting here, I've had a series of injuries throughout the years. I've learned, the hard way, that I really have to listen to my body (4 shoulder surgeries, 3 elbow surgeries). And I'm constantly experimenting, even after all these years. I think I will always struggle with the difference between fatigue and pain. With a serious back injury, swimming is about the only form of exercise I can do to get my aerobic fix, which I crave!
Find the balance! If swimming is something you really enjoy, do it as often as you want, but do it carefully. Remember to give yourself a rest day (or days), and vary your practices. Work kick sets, pull sets, drill sets, vary your strokes, do some distance, some sprint, etc. And think quality, not quantity. That has kept me in the water, and has meant so much to me physically and mentally.
Some good suggestions here; at age 40-41 I was a 2- or 3-day/week swimmer, but decided to start slowly increasing the work load last spring. For a long time I thought my arms would fall off if I swam every day, until I realized the old hard-easy rule from my running days. Try this...
If you're doing 2500 3 days/week now, why not mix in some easy swimming on your "off" days... say 1200 yards twice a week? Now all of a sudden you're swimming 5 days a week: 3 hard/normal days broken up by 2 easy days. Especially if, as you say, it's convenient and hard to stay away.
I did this and as I slowly increased my yardage I went from 2000-3000 for my hard days to 3500-5500, while my "easy" days went from 1000-1750 to 2000-2500. The trick is not to overdo it on those easy days.
If you have desire and possibility to swim every day. You may decrease yardage a bit to help your body to get used to it and then after you feel you got used increase it again.
Also if you do some sprint during your workouts try to do easy aerobic recovery trainings in between. If you swim aerobically most of the time then you have nothing to worry about.
How bad do you want to be good?
What are your goals?
It won't hurt you to train each day. You can handle it.
5 or 6 times a week is pretty good.
It's all a matter of what do you want to accomplish?
How much time per week do you want to dedicate?
It's better to have a coach and train with a team.
Attempt to do more meterage per practice, hold faster paces.
Test yourself. Swim the following distances for time:
like 25, 50, 75, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1k, 1500, 2k, 2.5k, 3k, 4k & 5k
do some test sets like:
5 or 10 x 50 or 100 fast
attempt to hold the same time
take the same # of seconds rest between each swim (like 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 45, & 1:00 rest between each)
then goal is to occasionally restest and see if you can go faster
if you train consistently you will improve
