Are days off sufficient recovery when swimming 3days/week?
Former Member
The club I swim with and help coach only swims three days a week. As I read the literature on daily and season planning the need for rest between high intensity workouts mostly deals with two workouts a day swimmers. If you have a day off between any two workouts does that give you enough recovery time such that you can you put in high intensity sets every workout?
Likewise in season planning you often see a few weeks of hard training and then a week of recovery training. Do three day a week swimmers actually need a recovery week or do they not get sufficiently broken down to need one?
On a slightly different topic, do people find it is more difficult to carry technique progress forward when only swimming every other day? Because I have a long drive to the pool I've been swimming longer workouts every other day and I'm getting rather frustrated with my lack of progress with butterfly. I improve through the course of a workout but then when I come back two days later I seem to be back at square one.
Parents
Former Member
I agree that 3x per week is less than ideal, I prefer to swim at least four days, preferably five. I'll recommend to the swimmers that they come in at least once on their own but I need to put together a training plan for people who only come to the three scheduled workouts.
Rob, I haven't timed an all out 25 or 50 for quite a while, I'm still working on trying to establish a consistent stroke. I went to a Bill Boomer clinic and got some really good adjustments to my fly, and when they click in I definitely know it. My frustration is that I can't seem to get it to click in consistently. I do almost entirely sets of 25m for fly, the last I checked they would come in around 20s just at moderate effort if I've got the flow. I've been doing 500-1000m of fly when I do a 2 hour swim, most twenty fives with lots of rest. Right now I would be ecstatic if I could consistently do even 25s with good form.
The team doesn't swim in the summer so I'm swimming on my own and going every other day for 1.5-2 hours. Probably I need to just forget about my bank balance and the environment and drive in every day until I've imprinted the fly. I'm actually starting to worry that I'll lose the new stroke entirely.
I used to do a 50m around 35 just by pure brute pulling force, and you could tell because I would go around 1:30 for the 100. My 200 stroke was such an abomination that I won't bother giving the time!
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Former Member
I agree that 3x per week is less than ideal, I prefer to swim at least four days, preferably five. I'll recommend to the swimmers that they come in at least once on their own but I need to put together a training plan for people who only come to the three scheduled workouts.
Rob, I haven't timed an all out 25 or 50 for quite a while, I'm still working on trying to establish a consistent stroke. I went to a Bill Boomer clinic and got some really good adjustments to my fly, and when they click in I definitely know it. My frustration is that I can't seem to get it to click in consistently. I do almost entirely sets of 25m for fly, the last I checked they would come in around 20s just at moderate effort if I've got the flow. I've been doing 500-1000m of fly when I do a 2 hour swim, most twenty fives with lots of rest. Right now I would be ecstatic if I could consistently do even 25s with good form.
The team doesn't swim in the summer so I'm swimming on my own and going every other day for 1.5-2 hours. Probably I need to just forget about my bank balance and the environment and drive in every day until I've imprinted the fly. I'm actually starting to worry that I'll lose the new stroke entirely.
I used to do a 50m around 35 just by pure brute pulling force, and you could tell because I would go around 1:30 for the 100. My 200 stroke was such an abomination that I won't bother giving the time!
