Why am I not getting faster?

You might be onto something, but I have also decreased mass and drag (no more rec suit) over that period, so my terminal velocity should have increased too. :)

:cheerleader:Focus on the positive - you're back in the water, consistenly swimming 3 x's a week. You're doing your best for now. I struggle with this and now consider myself a speed challenged swimmer:)......I'm still learning.....

perhaps you have reached terminal velocity

Performance in practice will vary by day and by week. This is why many coaches give the same warmup every single day- so that the swimmer can gauge how they are feeling that day and tune the workout to address their state. Not feeling peppy in warmup? Focus on technique and drills. Feeling overly sore? Recovery/slow day. Feeling good? Sprint day or lactate day. After a while you may even be able to guess how you are going to feel on a given day, so that your workouts start to follow a pattern within the week. This is part of swimming. Stick with it- you've only just started back, and I'll wager that in another 6 months you'll look back and wonder what you were thinking when you asked this question. Good luck!

what are your swimming goals? what's your age height weight previous swim experience make a video of you swimming fast and put it up on youtube Have someone time you on a few fast swims a week start measuring your times to the 10th of a second When you begin, improvements come in chunks, as you get faster, improvements come in 10ths. Pretty soon most of your low hanging fruit will be picked and the only fruit left will be out on the skinny branches. You can still pick them, but it takes more work. basically keep pushing, keep training, keep doing what you're doing. consider swimming 4 or 5 times a week instead of 3 are you lifting weights read swim faster faster. ande This thread is more of a frustrated vent than a request for advice, but input is appreciated. I am talking fly. When I first got back into swimming (about 6 months), I timed myself for 25s. I went 15/16 from a push, but I could only do it twice before I died. After a few weeks, I could hit 14/15 for 2 or three. I continue to do timed 25s on my sprint day so that I can measure my progress. I have hit 13. Last practice, I swam 14/15 for 8 25s. I have also added a 25 slow freestyle in between and now I do them on 1:30, which is just enough rest to feel fresh on each. It sure feels like I am a lot better, but If I am not faster, am I really? I am sure I'm a lot faster for a 50 or 100 (ie I can now survive 100) due to endurance, but shouldn't I be faster too? It doesn't seem to make a difference how fast I turn it over, either. If I am swimming hard, I swim 15. Breaststroke is actually opposite. I can build those (actually, just by going all out, I build) as I am around 18 for the first couple and 16 by the 8th. I have improved 6 seconds in my breaststroke 25 since I started. Total yardage is about 2000 3 times a week, which is all the time I can afford to get to the pool these days. Maybe I am getting impatient. I'd call it a plateau, but there was really no progress before it flattened out. :rantonoff:

what are your swimming goals? what's your age height weight previous swim experience make a video of you swimming fast and put it up on youtube read swim faster faster. ande Thanks everyone. This helps. The real test will be my meet on June 12. If I beat my 50 M fly time from 6 weeks ago, then I am doing fine. Speedo, I bet you're right and thanks for that. Part of what started me thinking about this is I found an old 50 fly card from when I was 11 and the time is about what I can hit now. :frustrated: Ande: I am 40, 5'9", 175, and I was a decent high school swimmer. I was accepted on a Division I team but did not swim due to injury. Total swimming time was 10 years. My lifetime best in 50y fly is low 24, swum in relays my senior year. I lost 35 pounds in the last year by counting calories, weight training and using a treadmill for cardio with the occasional swim (until December when I added 3-4 days of swimming and started trying for real). My standard workout is 400 warmup, 400 pulls and kicks, 800 drills (200 each stroke) and then either SDK, 50 sprints, or broken IMs until I run out of time, then cool down. On sprint day, I do the 400 sprints of *** and fly instead of the drills. When things get easier, I add to them -- I think I am going to add 100 full stroke at the end of each drill this week. I stopped lifting weights in March because it felt counterproductive to my swimming. I was in great lifting shape but not so good swimming shape, and I was stuck in the flexibility department. I plan to start weights again after my next meet. I'd like to do a video again soon. I have read swim faster faster twice, and I intend to do so again. My goal is to hit NQTs for each of the events I like to swim: 50 and 100 *** and fly and 100 IM, and maybe 50 and 100 free (I am starting to think about 200 IM and ***, too) before next year's nationals. :)

I hear ya. I've been swimming consistently for the last 20 months, and working hard on it. I've had some very nice drops (e.g. 13 seconds in the last year in the 500, much of it due to better race tactics), yet my time at nats in the 200 back, after 20 months of training, was 0.34 slower than I swam last July, after just 10 months of training. Here's my current working hypothesis, If you keep sowing the the same seed, you'll keep harvesting the same crop. I'm still training pretty much the same way I trained last year, so I'm still getting pretty much the same results. I have made some improvements from additional race experience and maybe some minor improvements in stroke mechanics and conditioning. But nothing that would lead to an Ande major breakthrough. So ... changes in the works ... First, add more dryland, particularly weight training. I've done no weight training to date. None at all. So why would I be any stronger than last year? Second, did you know kicking is propulsive? Apparently so! I have it on good authority, though I can't say from personal experience. I'm going to try Ande's program to see if I can make some improvements in the kicking department. Obviously I'll have to sacrifice something, but maybe I don't need yet another set of 5x200 on 3, or yet another 1650. We'll see.

One can only go so fast in a 25 and the difference in your times will seem like nothing. If you do 50s, you should see more variation, and even more with 100s. I feel like I could swim 25s until the cows came home with little variation in time. I would change up the program and add some new sets in there. You already have your baseline for 25s, now work on 50s.

Try to: Improve your techinque. Do more drills, focus on the weak points of your stroke. Add dryland training. Weight training, jump roping, plyometrics or what have you. Improve your SDK. And lastly: be patient. From what I gathered from your post, you haven't been training for that long. Learn to accept that you won't always be improving, that there will times when you will feel like you're plowing through the water and that you won't always meet your goals. It's all part of the sport. Just keep pushing and training consistently and one day you WILL go faster. Cheers :chug:

See, what was the worry? You can go a long time before a time drop. Just the nature of it toward the end of your progression. I'm experiencing it now. As far as building your breastroke even though you say you are gong all out.....even though you are getting tired, your timing and feel is improving during your set. Shows you how criticial that is in breastroke.