Hi all! I've just started taking up swimming. (for about 2 months now)
I try to swim 3 times a week and have been purely doing freestyle and increasing my distance each time. I finally reached my goal of 1 mile and was wondering what would be the best way to improve my 1 mile time.
I completed the mile in 39min50sec so roughly a 2min30 / 100m.
What training would you advice to improve this time? I have never tried drills, is this worth trying? or just keep swimming a mile each time, trying to go faster each time?
Any help would be great! My future goal (a long way off) would be to do a 30 min mile!
Cheers, Joey
Hi Joey, congrats on starting swimming and reaching your goal to be able to swim a mile!
You should be focusing on continuing to improve your level of conditioning, but at the same time it is absolutely essential to build your technical base. This is key to ensuring that your stroke is as efficient as possible and that you avoid any injuries that could result from repetitive, poor technique.
Drills are one part of improving your stroke technique, but you can't just do drills for their own sake. You need to know, out of the hundreds of drills you'll find, which ones are right for your specific needs. You'll also need to know whether you are executing these drills properly and whether you are doing the right amount in your workouts. A good workout needs to combine intervals, drills, kicking, in the right combination for you.
Because you are not able to see yourself in the water, finding a coach who specializes in stroke technique should be a necessary next step. This type of coach can analyze your technique and let you know what types of drills you need to do and when you need to do them.
That being said, sometimes it is difficult to find the right coach and if you can't locate one right away, this is an article I wrote for Ironman describing some essential drills you can try in the meantime. www.ironman.com/triathlon/news/articles/2014/11/5-essential-swimming-drills.aspx#axzz3g3lBArj6
But a good coach is irreplaceable.
Best of luck!!
Hmmm...do you always swim straight through to get the mile done? Also worth considering Apart from getting technique advice from a coach (which would put you in the right direction for drills), which I would highly recommend, you might want to consider changing your workout one day a week to a broken mile or something slightly over that distance but broken (like 1800 or 2000). Any way you'd like to break it and give yourself a good 10-15 seconds per 50 rest. In a yards pool some examples might be: 17x100, 9x200, 3x(1x500 EZ, 1x100 Hard). If you're swimming open water, you can tackle this by doing easy for a certain stroke count, then hard for a few strokes. It will help you to swim slightly faster and maintain a good technique rather than slogging through until the end.
Compare it to one of these learn to run programs you see everywhere and the one mile swim is like the 5k run. Well, once you can run a 5k, they start having you throw some speed work in once a week. Same thing with the one mile swim.
Have fun!
