Offseason Swim Workouts: Week 4

If you’ve been working your way through this series, you will almost certainly have noticed that although the series is meant to help you get faster in the water, we’ve done very little actual “sprint” work.  Instead, we’ve done fartlek-style work, which is great for building overall aerobic capacity and for giving you a little bit of burst at the end of a longer effort, but which is less apt to make you fast in an actual short-distance race.  This is by design.  This series is meant primarily for triathletes and is therefore tailored to longer distance swims, even though we’ve done mostly up-tempo work.

We’re still trying to build speed, but we’re trying to do it in such a way that it will benefit your endurance racing efforts when regular in-season training rolls around in the spring.  For now, the mix of tempo and aerobic work is accomplishing that purpose, but next week we’ll change it up, and if you’ve been following the series regularly, I think you’ll notice the difference.

Warm Up:

-- 2 x 200 easy @ :30 rest

-- 200 kick

Main Set:

-- 12 x 100 freestyle @ :15 rest

----- Every 4th 100 fast (90% effort) with :30 rest

200 kick

200 pull

4 x 100 @ :40 rest

----- 1st 50 @ aerobic pace (70% effort)

----- 2nd 50 accelerate (to 95% effort)

200 warm down

Notes:

This is similar to what we’ve been doing in other weeks.  In the Main Set, you will have to use active recovery, and then put down hard efforts for intervals 4, 8, and 12.

:40 rest should feel like a lot for the last set.  Use that time, keep your stroke long on those first 50s, and then accelerate to a very hard effort for the last 25 of each of those last four 100s.

Next week we’ll set our Cruise Intervals and start doing some different kinds of work.