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Swimming - Interval Basics
Swimming - Interval Basics
Interval Basics - Swimming
Are you a pool robot? Pool robots are swimmers who just jump in and start swimming, like a big toy with fresh batteries, plodding mechanically up and down and up and down. It's the work ethic with a dash of chlorine. And even though training like this is the least effective, it's how too many of us willingly squander our training time. That's why we're about to discuss intervals--a much better way to work out.
Meantime, if the description above sounds like you, don't be embarrassed. You have plenty of company. You may also be smiling broadly because it seems to you like that last chapter on slow swimming finally justified your mind-numbing, metronomic workouts. In fact, it did no such thing. Yes, you need a certain amount of purposeful, thoughtful swimming to build skills, but endless workouts with no objective are dead-end exercise.
In the Total Immersion Program we want to be sure you don't put speed before good technique, so we don't stress a lot of timed swimming early on. But staying in second gear is not the point either. To get ahead, you need a plan, you need structure, and you probably need some workouts where you push the throttle a bit harder.
You need intervals. And in this chapter, you shall have them. But not the scary, swim-'til-you drop exercises in exhaustion most people think of when they hear the word. Total Immersion intervals are scientific swimming that make the most of your time without asking you to beat yourself up.
Although many of us probably know that hanging out on medium-throttle autopilot until your energy or time run out won't take us far, it's how most fitness swimmers spend their time. Grab them between laps--if you can get them to stop at all--and you'll hear why: "I want to swim a mile." Like the 10K in running, it's a kind of gold standard distance against which everyone wants to measure him- or herself.
Nobody understands this better than the lifeguards, who know from experience that nearly every new swimmer will come up at one time or other asking, "How many laps to the mile here?" Most pools now simply post the number for all to see. Armed with that intelligence (in a 25-yard pool, by the way, the magic figure is 70.4), they begin trying to chip away at the mountain. If they can't make it nonstop right away, they'll settle for doing it piecemeal. Knock off three sets of 20, then finish up with an easy 10 or 12. The goal is inevitably to go longer and rest less until they can finally patch it all together into one nonstop triumph. They congratulate themselves, as well they might, but the glow doesn't last long. Because tomorrow, naturally, they've got to come back and swim it faster. Then that new challenge remains interesting for a while until the times simply level off and go nowhere. All that's apparently left then is to soldier on because "it's good for you."
That's not you? For one thing, you don't have the time to squander on that kind of distance? Well, then, maybe you're the clock-watching type who dashes into the health club at lunchtime with 40 minutes to spare. On day 1, you probably peter out after 10 or 20 lengths (to coaches and competitive swimmers, by the way, a length and a lap are the same), even with a minute or two of rest between each. But you keep whittling away just as any would-be miler would, adding laps, subtracting rest, anxious to pump up that 40-minute lap "score." And true enough, after a while you'll probably be able to swim the full 40 minutes without stopping, which may even add up to a mile (70 lengths). With luck, you'll even be able to pile on a couple more lengths just for good measure. But eventually you too will reach your swimming equilibrium ("terminal mediocrity" one of my campers called it), and the end of anything remotely interesting about your workouts.
That's what always comes of making the lap tally the holy grail of your swimming. You waste time fretting over how many or how fast--instead of how right--you are doing each one. Instead, you should be fretting about stagnation. The body gets so used to what you're doing that there's no stimulus to improve. The principles of adaptation and overload will see you through for awhile in the beginning since, if you've never swum a mile, the preparation for it is an overload which does train your body. But once you've done the mile and done it again, where do you go? The world's best swimmers, the human fish who train with coaches, are always baffled by the lap swimmer's dead-end routine. "Doesn't it get boring?" they ask, since they know there's a much better way to invest their time. "Well, yes," answers the lap swimmer. "But it's good for me."
Well it could be a lot better for you and a lot more fun too if you'd switch to intervals or, for the less-technical, to what I call "stopping-on-purpose-with-a-plan." You need to know how to make the clock work for you. So let's do some interval training the Total Immersion way.
Why Is That Clock Missing a Hand?
The pace clock, that big, octagonal, white-faced moon with the sweep hand on the wall near the end of virtually every lap pool in America, is the key to your graduation from pointless swimming to smart interval training. Since swimmers measure performance in minutes and seconds, the pace clock has a minute hand and a sweep hand, but no hour hand. One minute--one sweep of the second hand around the clock face--is divided into 12 five-second intervals. The five-second intervals (:05-:10, :10-:15, etc.) are shown with both a red mark and large black numbers. The four marks (seconds) between them are black marks. Swimmers usually start their repeats on a red (5-second) mark.
The pace clock tells you everything you need to know for effective interval training, whether you're coached or uncoached. Read it to find out 1) how fast you've swum each repeat, and 2) how much rest remains before your next one.
Use it as a tool, not a tyrant. Become too absorbed with the pace clock and you'll allow it to grow into an unforgiving taskmaster. Swimmers who meticulously focus only on how fast they're swimming and never mind the efficiency price (how many strokes, how high a heart rate) are really practicing sloppy swimming. But use the clock as a valuable tool to help build up your technique, and it will make all your practices more valuable. And more fun.
Total Immersion intervals are a little different from what you may be used to. Most athletes use the "i" word to broadly describe any training that's tough, repetitive, leaves you out of breath, and gets you ready for a race. Work out, throw up, go home.
I use them differently. Yes, there are intervals that can prepare you for an all-out race. But there are dozens of others as well. The questions I get most often, and the answers you need to train the Total Immersion way, are:
1. What effect can I expect?
In Total Immersion swimming, the objective of anything we do--intervals included--is improvement of technique, whether you're learning new skills, consolidating them through practice, or testing how well you can hold onto them as you swim farther and faster.
Building endurance, increasing speed, improving your tolerance for anaerobic training, or practicing racing or pacing strategies, are worthwhile secondary objectives which you should expect from your intervals. But they are secondary.
2. How many should I do?
Decide this way: 1) Do enough to give yourself adequate aerobic conditioning (a set lasting at least 10 to 15 minutes --including swim and rest time--in a workout of 4 or 5 sets). 2) Don't do so many that your technique or concentration suffer.
3. How far should I go?
Repeats can technically be any distance from 25 yards to 800 yards or more, but for stroke improvement, which is the name of our game, shorter ones are nearly always better. While longer repeats help develop endurance and pace sense, they generally undermine speed and technique. Shorter repeats (generally 200 yards and less) don't have this disadvantage, and can give you virtually everything you want. For greater endurance, increase the number of repeats and/or decrease the rest. For more speed, choose fewer, faster repeats, and more rest.
4. Must I swim all-out? No indeed. First of all, you can measure intensity in several ways: 1) percent of maximum heart rate, 2) percent of maximum speed, or 3) perceived exertion (how hard does it feel?). Higher intensity develops more speed and anaerobic fitness. Lower intensity is better for development of technique, for improving aerobic fitness, and for practice of pacing: learning to swim at the same speed for a long time, even as you grow more tired.
5. How much rest is enough? Your fitness (aerobic endurance) goes up fastest when the rest period between swims is one-half or less of the swim time, usually shown as a work:rest ratio of 2:1. Ratios of 3:1 all the way up to 10:1 are common in building endurance and you'll see them often in swim-training books. When you do, watch out. In Total Immersion, technique and efficiency come before absolutely everything else, so be careful that your intervals are challenging enough to promote fitness, yet not so tight you have to throw away efficiency as you fight fatigue to do them.
Work:rest ratios of 1:1, 1:2, etc. (more rest than work) develop speed and anaerobic fitness since the longer rest lets you swim them much faster. A short rest interval doesn't allow enough recovery for an all-out push.
6. Are all repeats straight swimming? Not at all. The variety is limitless. You can drill, drill-swim, or just swim. Use any of the four strokes you want to practice. Work on pulling and kicking with or without a pull buoy and/or kickboard. (More on use of these and other training tools in Chapter 00), even make every interval different from the one before (descending sets, pyramids, ladders, etc. More on this below).
Basic Intervals: Four Good Ways to Watch the Clock
1. Fixed-rest sets
Example: 4 x 200 yards on 60 seconds rest
Number of repetitions: 4
Distance of each rep: 200 yards
Start each repetition: 60 seconds after finishing the last one
You don't get intervals more basic than this, so it's the place to start if you're new. You're guaranteed the same amount of rest, no matter how slowly or how fast you swim. Do the first 200 in 3:00 and you start the second at the 4:00 mark. If your second 200 slows to 3:20, you start the third at 4:20, holding your minute's rest no matter what.
To make it easier to keep track, most swimmers round off the rest to leave on a "red mark" on the clock. After a 200 at 3:17, they'd probably go again at 4:15 or 4:20, not 4:17.
2. Fixed-interval sets
Example: 8 x 100 yards on 2:00
Number of repetitions: 8
Distance of each rep: 100 yards
Start each repetition on: 2:00 (includes swim time plus rest time)
This is fairly basic too, but it's a little tougher and more strategic than (1). You start each 100-yard repeat 2:00 after starting the previous one, regardless of how much or little rest that gives you. Finish the first 100 in 1:30 and you get :30 off. Slip to a 1:35 pace on the second and your rest before you start your third repeat slips too: to :25. The only way to keep the slope from getting steeper and steeper--and each repeat from probably getting harder and harder--is to keep up, which means swimming close to the same pace on all 8. Since your tank gets lower each time, you have to figure how to parcel out the work (we explain this in our next chapter on racing) a little better each time so you end up swimming numbers 1 and 8 at the same speed.
3. Decreasing-interval sets
Example: 5 x 50 yards on intervals of 1:00-:55-:50-45
Number of repetitions: 4
Distance of each rep: 50 yards
Start each repetition on: Decreasing rest (see below)
Decreasing-interval sets are tougher yet than (2) because on each successive repeat, as you're growing more tired, you automatically get less rest.
Take the example above. The first interval (for the second repeat) is 1:00, the next is :55, and the last is :50. So if you swam each repeat in :40, you'd rest :20 before swimming the second, :15 before starting the third, and just :05 before the fifth.
Not for sissies. But believe it or not, an accomplished repeat swimmer can actually swim slightly faster on each succeeding repeat, regaining a sliver of "lost" rest.
Decreasing intervals are often used by coaches to get you used to the tough challenge of holding your pace in a race, when everything in your body is beginning to say, "Hey, take it easy will you?"
4. Increasing-interval sets
Example: 8 x 50 (1-4 on 1:00, 5-8 on 1:30)
Number of repetitions: 8
Distance of each rep: 50 yards
Start each repetition on: 1:00 for first half, 1:30 for second
This seems like it gives you a break, since you get :30 more rest before each repetition in the second half than in the first. But there's a catch: With that extra rest, you're supposed to swim faster. (And if you do, as we now know, you get still more rest if you're swimming fixed intervals like these.)
The increasing interval is usually used by coaches to speed you up as the set progresses since the added rest makes the intervals easier to swim harder and faster. It's a kind of rehearsal for finishing a set (and hopefully a race) strongly.
Interval "design" is limited only by a coach's creativity, and over the years many of us have gotten pretty creative. In fact, you could probably write a whole book just on the elaborate schemes that have been devised to organize your pool time with your eye on the pace clock. "Descending sets" are sets that grow faster one by one, "ladders" and "pyramids" either increase the length of each rep, or increase it for half the set and then shorten it again on the other half. If that's not enough to keep track of, rest changes too since it's usually calculated from the length of the leg you've just done. And in mixed-distance sets everything is in play, with distances and rest intervals changing and changing again.
But the four bread-and-butter interval formats above will give you the most direct route to improvement, and they don't take a waterproof calculator to keep track of. Besides, it's what you put into each length--not how elaborately your whole program is organized--that gets results.
The "starter kit" below uses nothing fancier than fixed-rest sets. But it will groom you for any goal from basic fitness to a race time you'll be proud of. Just make sure you follow the weekly yardage guidelines. The tougher work, for race-readiness and speed, is like a powerful medicine. You should take just the prescribed amount for best results. More is not better, and can be harmful.
Ready, Set, Repeat!
1. Fitness intervals
(60 to 100% of total training yardage.)
This is relatively slow, easy swimming that builds aerobic endurance. The aim is extensive rather than intensive training. Speed (or heart rate) is only 65% to 75% of your maximum for the repeat distance (i.e. if your best time for 100 yds was 1:20, you would repeat at 1:45 to 2:00 in a fitness interval set. [TERRY: math OK? I get 1:40 to 1:48. Aren't you going 25% to 35% slower, so it's those percentages times 80 (60 + 20) added to 1:20?]) Besides, speed is also held down by short rest periods. To work, the set should be at least 20 minutes. If you're prepping for an extremely long event (e.g. an Ironman distance swim) it can be made as long as an hour by adding more repeats.
Examples:
16-30 x 50 (10-20 seconds rest)
10-20 x 75 (10-20 seconds rest)
8-15 x 100 (10-30 seconds rest)
5-10 x 150 (15-30 seconds rest)
4-8 x 200 (15-40 seconds rest)
Remember the bedrock principle of the Total Immersion program? "Training is something that happens to you while you're practicing good technique." Fitness intervals are a perfect example. You can build fitness and efficiency at the same time simply by turning your fitness intervals into drills, drill-swims, sensory skill practice, or other skill-building technique. Try some of these typical combinations:
1. Drill 16 x 50 Slide & Glide (or your choice) on 20 seconds rest
2. Drill-swim 12 x 75 on 20 seconds rest (50 drill - 25 swim)
3. Sensory skill practice 8 x 100 on 20 seconds rest (50 swim downhill - 50 swim with a weightless arm)
4. Stroke eliminators 8 x 100 on 20 seconds rest (hold at 17-18 strokes per length, assuming a "normal" s/l of 19-20.)
5. Swimming Golf 8 x 50 on 20 seconds rest. Add strokes and time for each repeat to get score for each repeat, and try to reduce your score between reps 1 and 8.
2. Race readiness intervals
(0 to 30% of total training yardage.)
The best way to get ready for a race is to race, so on these intervals you simulate the speeds and physical stresses you'll face after the gun goes off. The usual goal is to make your cardiovascular system and skeletal muscles more able to tolerate oxygen debt (muscles need more than CV system can deliver). The Total Immersion goal goes a step further: to let you practice holding on to your efficiency at racing speeds. You do that by trying to minimize the difference in s/l (strokes per length) between your fitness intervals and your speed intervals. Your total should not increase by more than 10% on speed intervals, so if you hold 18 on fitness intervals, don't take more than 20 on speed intervals.
A work:rest ratio of 1:1 should provide enough recovery to let you reach 80% or more of maximum speed (and HR) on each repeat, which is where you should do your race readiness intervals.
Examples:
(Total distance of repeats should equal 60% to 100% of race distance. Example, to prep for 1500-meters, do sets of 20-30 x 50, or 10-15 x 100)
8-30 x 50 (30-60 seconds rest)
6-20 x 75 (45-90 seconds rest)
4-15 x 100 (60 seconds - 2 minutes rest)
(Count strokes or play swimming golf on all.)
3. Speed intervals.
(0-10% of total training yardage.)
These are your racing "finishing school" since they work on everything you need in a race--the anaerobic system, swimming-specific power, and your ability to stay efficient at race speeds--by letting you swim distances shorter than the race at race pace or faster. Your Total Immersion goal is to produce the most speed on the lowest possible stroke count. The work:rest ratio is 1:2 to 1:3. Sets and repeats are short and are only done once or, at most, twice a week.
Examples:
8 x 25 (40-60 seconds rest) for 50-100 yard races
4-10 x 50 (90 seconds to 3 minutes rest) for 100-200 yard races
4-8 x 75 (2-3 minutes rest) for 100-200 yard races
3-8 x 100 (3-5 minutes rest) for 500-1650 yard races
(Count strokes or play swimming golf on all.)
Swimming with the pace clock doesn't mean swimming 'til you drop. It does mean swimming smart. Anyone can dive in and just churn up and down the pool until the gas runs out. Many do, thinking speed will make them better athletes regardless of how they get it. But the price they pay in wasted time and lost efficiency is high. Intervals give you instead a goal, and a structured and purposeful way of measuring your progress along the path towards it.
And Total Immersion intervals give you the most direct path of all.
Before starting an exercise program, consult a physician..
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