How long before improvement????

I sometimes swim with my 13 year old. She is a good training partner, we are comparable in speed. It is fun. If your starts are good, you can get at least a second, maybe more. I think your times right now are pretty darn good and if you work on your endurance, you will find them drop. We women often tend to put everyone else first and forget to take time for ourselves. If morning does not work for you, schedule an hour at lunch, and hour later in the day, but say to yourself, this is my time, I deserve it, and stick to it! My family KNOWS not to bug me during my work-out time. They wait unless the house or dog or something is on fire. :D

How tall are you because maybe the reason the weight is not coming off is because it is a good weight for you. With swimming, you will add some muscle mass, so you will appear smaller than your weight actually says. your swim times are already good for your age and the number of weeks that you have been swimming. I suggest you work on building up your endurance. 300-400 yards is not a lot of yardage, so try to build up to doing 1000-1500 in that same 30 minutes. I think you will find that once your level of endurance reaches that amount that lowering your sprint times will become a little easier. also, be careful about undercutting your calories too much in the quest to get the weight to budge. There is a fine line if you cross that you will hurt your training. You are not there because you are really not training that much, but as you train more, you will need to fuel more, and you will need to find how much you need to sustain the work-out, but lose the weight. Not easy and different for everyone, and different for a 20 year old compared to a 45 year old.

I think 5-4 and 127 is a good weight. 117 may be too thin, although without seeing your bone structure hard to tell. I have an 18 year old and 13 year old, work full time and do lots of volunteer work with all of their activities, plus a few of my own. I get up early to work-out, most mornings before 5. I swim at lunch a lot and eat at my desk(which probably is not a good habit, but do what I have to do). About 10 years ago I switched from doing weight work in a gym to working out at home, which is much better for time management, although all the equipment tends to clutter my family room. Your 14 year old would be having PE classes in school, so have PE classes at home and do your dry-land work-out with her or teach her to swim and get her in the pool as well. There is a homeschooler that swims with the adult lessons at the Y, and she seems to have a good time. It is a matter of scheduling time for yourself and making sure your family knows this aspect of your life is as important as other things.

If you're only able to swim a few hundred yards a day, a 50 is still a long distance for you. Work more on endurance, gradually increasing both the total distance you swim and the longest you can swim without stopping. If you're currently doing 400 yds in 30 min, next week shoot for 450 yds each day, then 500 yds the next week. You may also want to work on technique. It sounds like you are reasonably in shape, but cannot move through the water efficiently. Find some drills to improve your stroke. Technique is why a very out-of-shape former swimmer is often a faster swimmer than a very in-shape runner with little swimming experience.

Concho, As noted by others, increasing yardage should be a priority. Based on your stats, I'd think that you should target about 1500 yards in a 30 minute workout. Working out w/ a group/team and a coach would probably be great. Do you have that option? And don't do the resistance training right before swimming . . . that'll prevent you from adding the distance.

I'm 5' 4 I do my walking, bike and weights on differnet days than my swim days. I'm currently working out at our YMCA. Another issue is I'm currently swimming an avg. of 3 days per week. I have a 14yr. daughter and we homeschool, how do I find a balance between what I want and what my family needs? How do ya'll do it?

I forgot to mention I do take her with me and work with her swimming. Right now I'm kinda doing about 150-200 on my own, then I do another 50 - 100 with her and switch back and forth. I guess I just need to schedule some time just for my self. dorothyrde your are a great encourgement, thanks - I'm working on it I'm just find it sooo hard to get up early in the morning and swim. However it may be the best thing for me. Also, the times I'm currently doing are pushed off the wall, I haven't even started working on my starts yet. How much can a person expect to shave off there push off time with a racing start?

Originally posted by hofffam Energy cost of exercise can be estimated here: www.primusweb.com/.../calculat.htm I notice that site isn't restricted to sports. They have such things as "bathing dog". Of course for a real workout I could try "bathing cat".;)

Concho, At this juncture, you're probably better off focused on increasing yardage rather than improving your 50 time. That will come with the yardage. You can worry about speed improvements once you get to a reasonable training level. IMHO you're not there yet. You say that you can do a 50 in 35 secs and a 100 in 1:20 (I'm assuming SCY). So why not do a 300 warmup, then 5 x 100 on the 2:00 then 10 x 50 on the 1:00 then a 200 cool down there you are at 1500 and it should take you about a 1/2 hour.