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
The masters team I used to swim with offered 5 sessions Tue pm, Thur pm, Fri pm, Sat am, Sun pm, of which I usually swam 3 or 4. Our coach would have us swim endurance and intervals on the Tue, Thur, Sat practices, with the Sat am, being the hardest of all, then the Sunday was focussed more on technique and sprints, I guess a "recovery" from Saturday. I never felt as though I needed a rest week, and if I did, I would just skip a session or take it easy.
The Fri pm was attended by the less competitive swimmers aka "Friday Night Ladies" and the workout reflected that......I would sometimes go for the social, but often not put too much effort in as the session finished at 9.30pm and the Sat one started at 6.30 am!
As for the fly question.....little and often definitely worked when I was teaching my kids to swim......but I'm gonna be no help as I was never taught to swm fly.......I was asked to swim my first ever length at about 8 years old, did it better that most of the kids a couple of years older than me and its been my stroke ever since.......
The masters team I used to swim with offered 5 sessions Tue pm, Thur pm, Fri pm, Sat am, Sun pm, of which I usually swam 3 or 4. Our coach would have us swim endurance and intervals on the Tue, Thur, Sat practices, with the Sat am, being the hardest of all, then the Sunday was focussed more on technique and sprints, I guess a "recovery" from Saturday. I never felt as though I needed a rest week, and if I did, I would just skip a session or take it easy.
The Fri pm was attended by the less competitive swimmers aka "Friday Night Ladies" and the workout reflected that......I would sometimes go for the social, but often not put too much effort in as the session finished at 9.30pm and the Sat one started at 6.30 am!
As for the fly question.....little and often definitely worked when I was teaching my kids to swim......but I'm gonna be no help as I was never taught to swm fly.......I was asked to swim my first ever length at about 8 years old, did it better that most of the kids a couple of years older than me and its been my stroke ever since.......
