Work on technique and fitness in the same session with John Wood’s essential February set
It is possible to improve your fitness while maintaining good technique, says coach John Wood, especially if you follow the 60min base-fitness-building pool session he prescribes this month…
Many swimmers find it a challenge to fit technical work and aerobic training in as well as speed sessions. This can be especially problematic if you only have one or two sessions a week for swim training. But when planning your sessions, it’s important to remember that technique doesn’t have to be a distinct focus. You can do aerobic training or threshold sets and still maintain a technical focus at the same time.
When doing aerobic or threshold training, rest periods should be kept fairly short – no more than 10 or 20secs at any one time. This is because you want to maintain a working heart rate to build on your fitness. That said, you can do reps as short as 50 or 100m and do many of them, rather than trying to swim 400, 800 or even 1km reps for the sake of doing the distance.
By doing shorter reps, even with a reduced recovery period, you should be able to maintain a slightly faster pace throughout your set or the session as a whole. Because you start each rep relatively fresh, the added bonus is that you’ll also have a bit more time, energy and concentration to maintain strong form, which will help you swim faster.
When planning your sessions, you might choose to set yourself a challenge, for example trying to hit as many 100m reps at a reasonably comfortable pace (maybe 2mins) with only 10secs recovery in between. Once you can manage 15-20 reps, it might be time to adjust the target. For an aerobic target pace, you should be able to talk at the end of each rep. If you’re aiming more towards your target race pace, you’ll probably be a little breathless even after the first effort. Use the session on the opposite page to help you improve your aerobic base training. 220