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
Thanks Matt and Frank, I will try both of your suggestions tomorrow and see how it goes.
I was thinking that if the first half of a fifty is crap the second half probably will be too, but when I think back it is often the case that, at least with freestyle, I'll eventually find my groove. With freestyle of course if my stroke is off I don't have much choice but to work it out unless I want to just get out of the pool!
Unfortunately I don't have anyone to watch and give me feedback. Lately I've often thought that it would be really nice if there were a couple video cameras set up with a time delay so that you could swim a length and then watch it at the end of the lane.
Thanks again, I'm keen to get to the pool tomorrow and see what happens.
Thanks Matt and Frank, I will try both of your suggestions tomorrow and see how it goes.
I was thinking that if the first half of a fifty is crap the second half probably will be too, but when I think back it is often the case that, at least with freestyle, I'll eventually find my groove. With freestyle of course if my stroke is off I don't have much choice but to work it out unless I want to just get out of the pool!
Unfortunately I don't have anyone to watch and give me feedback. Lately I've often thought that it would be really nice if there were a couple video cameras set up with a time delay so that you could swim a length and then watch it at the end of the lane.
Thanks again, I'm keen to get to the pool tomorrow and see what happens.
