
Speed is a great measure of measuring training load when it comes to swimming.
#Swimming endurance workouts how to#
How to measure your CrossFit swimming workouts? Velocity assisted (i.e., use paddles and fins):įind more CrossFit swimming workouts here. Begin with 40 seconds rest between 150s whenever you can hold all sets at your projected race pace, reduce the rest periods by 5 seconds. 30-second vertical kick with hands out of water (“eggbeaters”)ĭo every 7-10 days or so.Use the following CrossFit swimming workouts as benchmarks, testing them regularly to measure improvement and to know which areas need work. Kick: use only your legs, placing your arms on a kickboard.Pull: use only your arms, with paddles on the hands and a buoy between the legs.A suggested warmup is three consecutively faster rounds of 150 meters swim (freestyle), 100 meters kick, 100 meters pull. They do not include warm ups or skill drills, so make sure you add that specific work before your sessions at the pool. These CrossFit swimming workouts assume you know how to swim – you can freestyle, breaststroke and backstroke – and are thought for a 25-meter pool. Swimming adds variety into your training: the range of movement in your joints required to swim through all strokes is different to movement you’d usually do in the Box, which adds great variety without reducing relevance (think shoulder mobility to swim butterfly vs shoulder mobility for the overhead squat).ĬrossFit Games athlete and former NCAA Championship Swimmer Colleen Fotsch offers some useful advice for swimming beginners hoping to get faster.Swimming is a full-body workout: especially if you train all four strokes (which, as a CrossFit athlete, you shouldn’t be surprised about), every large muscle group in your body, as well as small muscle groups around your joints, will be taxed in the pool.Swimming will improve your endurance and strength: swimming is great resistance training, water is about 900 times thicker than air and a highly unstable medium for applying power, so it requires way more energy to move through.Source: Stevie D Photography Why Add Swimming in Your CrossFit WODs? However, it is still possible to combine CrossFit-style training with swimming sessions that you can do at the pool. Most CrossFit athletes are not training for competitive swimming events and don’t track paces or times. Swimming is also a great low-impact sport and can be a great recovery tool. Follow this up with 10 sets of 50 yards or meters, speeding up in the second half as you make your final push towards the wall.Perfect your swimming and improve your fitness with these CrossFit swimming workouts.Īdding swimming workouts to your training can help improve your technique and increase your endurance. For a more rigorous sprint workout, swim 10 sets of 100 yards or meters, speeding up on the last 25 yards or last half of the second meter lap. If your base time is two minutes, 15 seconds, then your next time should be 2:10, and so on. Start with five sets of 100 yards or meters at a comfortable interval, gradually decreasing your swim time by five seconds each 100 yards or meters. Sprint workouts can be grueling, so pepper your workout schedule with sprint sets at first, then progressively add more. This focus on efficiency versus speed will help carry over to whatever stroke or race you swim. Even if you're primarily a distance swimmer, sprinting trains you physically and mentally to swim at a faster pace. It can get tedious to swim the same laps over and over again, but mixing in sprint sets work those muscles harder and faster, keeping you energized. Consistently swimming the same endurance sets will not only consistently work out the same muscles, but also become tiring after a while.

Whether you're a competitive swimmer or not, sprint training changes up your routine. Because of this muscle buildup, you're able to perform endurance swim sets with more speed and strength behind each stroke. With freestyle, for example, it particularly build muscles in the shoulders, arms and back. Those short intervals build up muscles all over, but can help with specific muscle groups depending on the stroke. Swimming at top speeds forces you to work harder, and thus requires top muscles.


Great technique can only take you so far - in order to sprint, you need incredible strength. Sprint training helps you get used to this kind of fatigue and perform well in spite of it. Your performance over time deteriorates because your muscle contractions are impaired. As a result, this is why you must expend more energy while sprinting, but also feel a greater amount of fatigue. Sprinting involves using anaerobic metabolism, where muscle cells rely on other reactions that do not require oxygen to fuel muscle contraction. This means you are constantly fueling your body with oxygen, and your muscle cells contract repeatedly. Distance swimming uses aerobic metabolism.
