Started swimming again this year in an effort to get in better shape. Haven't done it since college (I'm 43), and that was just for exercise. Did it as a kid, now my kids also swim. At any rate, I'm just doing laps right now. Usually 6 sets of 500, occasionally only 5 and occasionally 7 or 8. ~5 days a week when life doesn't get in the way (so about 15,000 yards per week). About 25% ***, 25% back, and 50% free. I have occasionally thrown some fly in there, but I just can't do it without it fatiguing me to the point where the remainder of the set is very suboptimal.
At any rate, I am wondering at what point I should start looking to transition to doing workouts, rather than just laps. There is no Masters program that will work for me, so I'd just be following the posted workouts from the forums. Should I just jump right in? Should I start from "week 1," or just hit it right in the middle? Also, should I just be looking mostly at the general workouts, of mixing it up with the IM workouts to get more strokes, or start with general and slowly work my way towards the IM stuff?
Anything y'all need to know to help guide me the right way?
Which workouts you use should depend on your goals. Are you trying to work your way back into meet swimming? Sprints? Distance? Open water?
No set goals for any events that are swimming related - I've blown past my weight loss goal, but still have a little work to do to get my standing heart rate down to the arbitrary number I've picked. One of my kids is a AAAA swimmer in a few events, so that takes up a whole lot of the free time I would have. So the notion of doing any competitions myself is not really feasible at present. In the future, perhaps, but not right now.
But I generally do better when I have something a bit more concrete to try to accomplish. For example, I started out making 300 yard sets, and only about 1500 yards. So I've worked my way up too 500 yard sets and up to 4000 yards per workout. So my stamina has improved significantly, I'd now like to try to improve my strength a bit, so I think some of the shorter/faster sets with fins/paddles will probably help with that. But I WOULD like to get back to being able to do Butterfly, which was "my" stroke as a kid. I am inclined to go with just the basic training for now?
Thanks everyone for the quick feedback.
Which workouts you use should depend on your goals. Are you trying to work your way back into meet swimming? Sprints? Distance? Open water?
No set goals for any events that are swimming related - I've blown past my weight loss goal, but still have a little work to do to get my standing heart rate down to the arbitrary number I've picked. One of my kids is a AAAA swimmer in a few events, so that takes up a whole lot of the free time I would have. So the notion of doing any competitions myself is not really feasible at present. In the future, perhaps, but not right now.
But I generally do better when I have something a bit more concrete to try to accomplish. For example, I started out making 300 yard sets, and only about 1500 yards. So I've worked my way up too 500 yard sets and up to 4000 yards per workout. So my stamina has improved significantly, I'd now like to try to improve my strength a bit, so I think some of the shorter/faster sets with fins/paddles will probably help with that. But I WOULD like to get back to being able to do Butterfly, which was "my" stroke as a kid. I am inclined to go with just the basic training for now?
Thanks everyone for the quick feedback.
