best workouts with no coach

Michele - I've been swimming masters for 10 years now with no official coach. Sometimes I swim my workout alone but most of the time I have a few friends to meet and swim with. If you are trying to go it alone, I highly suggest finding some other swimmers to group up with. Its much easier to self-coach when you have some friends to share in the workout. Also, I find the "Go the Distance" program thru USMS is a great motivator. I use it to compare weeks, months, years of swimming distances and aspire to reach higher goals. Keep plugging and good luck.

Since starting back swimming after 15 years I've been swimming alone and training myself. Feel free to steal from my blog. If you start from the beginning (Aug 08') it should be pretty basic stuff and build into what I now do today. jeffpalm-swimming.blogspot.com/

When you first start, the best indication of progress is distance. How far can you swim without stopping. This might start at 25s, and you swim 20 25s with 20 seconds rest and you are done for the day. Decrease the amount of rest, and increase quality. Eventually you will want to do 50s, 75s, 100s, etc. Eventually you will get to the point where you could swim non stop the entire workout if you wanted to. At this point it is time to start thinking about breaking things up. There is a workouts section of the forums, and the majority of the workouts are appropriate for people who can swim non stop for an hour, but need something more interesting. How do you show improvement using workouts? There will sets that are repeated, like 4x100 on 2:00 might show up frequently. This is where you want to get faster, aka get more rest. Eventually you will feel like you are just hanging out on the wall for no reason, and this would be a good time to make the interval tighter. Say you are doing 100s on 2:00 and get 30 seconds rest, but have caught your breath after 15 seconds. Try cutting 5/10/15 seconds off your interval. When you are doing planned workouts, those are the two main ways of showing progress, either you go faster and have more rest, or cut down the rest you need. Finding a team to swim with makes this easier, because you have a coach to explain the parts that don't make sense, and you have other people to benchmark yourself against. If you have a team in the area, I strongly suggest joining them for a practice. New comers are almost always warmly welcomed. If it is an early practice, the warmness might not be detectable until after practice ;)