I guess they finally let me post. I am a Distance Swimmer and have been doing GPP training since the spring. I swim mostly the 500 and the 200 yard freestyle.
Today I swam 3000 yards for pool time:
20 X 50 @ 60 for warm-up
10 X 100 @ 140
2 X 500 @ smooth pace
After that I had a pull-day in terms of lifting. Rather than doing the normal variety of pull excercises, I did a peculiar set of pull ups:
Sets of 5 pull-ups with 3 minutes rest. Doing as many sets as possible until unable to complete all five. I ended up doing 16 sets total. Then I did three sets of Bicep curls w/ an easy curl bar. Then I did some light core, stretched and went home.
Good start…I would add more swimming and keep the lifts general…perhaps you can do 5 grand per session and keep the distancs longer and more continuous.
I couldn’t lift today because of work, but I got my pool yardage in. The water was freezing though:
5 X 100 warm-up
8 X 500 for main yardage
5 X 100 ward-down
I felt slow and tight, but I think it was mostly the tempurature.
I did my basic stretching when I got home, while watching the olymics (swimming, obviously).
Today was good. I felt a little tired all day. No swimming today, even though I made every effort. I showed up extra early to the pool to swim before I had to teach a lesson, but it thundered. We had to clear the pool and my lesson got pushed back, so I couldn’t swim afterwards either. Lifting went very well today, Though:
60 minutes Yoga
6 X 10 reps of Squats @ 175; 3 min rest
3 X 10 reps of split lunges each leg, 3 round strip set;3 min rest each leg
Upper Body stretching
I love the leg days where you walk into your house after lifting and you feel it. This was one of those days. During Yoga I also noticed that my flexibility is much better than the beginning of spring. In the words of Mr. Burns, “excellent, hehe…”
I had work again today, so no lifting. Its just as well because I’m still pretty sore from the past few days. As for swimming, I got in 500 yards every break, for a total of about 3000. I had to stop swimming because we cleared the pool for thunder. It would have been strange for me to be swimming after telling all the patrons to get out of the pool. I was pissed about the thunder b/c I would rather swim on a hot day than sit around listening to the patrons whine about getting back in the pool.
Tuesday: Pool: 10 x 100 wu6 x 500
20 x 50 wd
Lift: 60 min. Pilates
Push circut: 6x {(bench 3 reps), rest 30
(dips max), rest 30
(10 push-ups), rest 30}, rest 2 min.
Wednesday: Pool: 5000 yards of 500’s during breaksLift: 10 x 10 reps deadlifts @ 145, rest 5 min.
Thursday: Pool: 5000 yards of 500’s during breaksLift: 5 x Max Pull-Ups, During each rest: 2 x 15 reps light Bicep curls.
Pull-Up Deterieration: 11, 9, 8, 8, 8
Friday: No PoolLift: 5 x 10 reps bench, time under tension: 2-2-2
3 x 10 reps dips
3 x 10 reps tricep extensions
3 x 10 reps external rotation shoulder Rehab
Basic Stretching Every day!
I feel good, just starting to feel those dead-lifts. I had a little trouble sleeping though. I think it’s the matress, so I’ll try a different bed tonight to see if there’s a difference.
Sorry I have not posted recently, things have been busy.
We are finished lifting, basically we just continued on the push, pull, legs rotation. School started two weeks ago and things have been nuts.
we started swimming last week, and here is saturday’s workout:
warm-up: 20 X 50 free/back @ 1
20 X 100 @ 1:40 ; 50 kick, 50 swim
10 X 50 @ 1 ; smooth
Main Set: 500 @ 7 min
200, 100, 200; @ 7 min ; rest 20 sec before & after 100
5 X 100 @ 130
10 X 50 @ 45 sec.
Warm down: 5 X 50 @ 1
5 min. hot tub
Well, I am the epitome of procrastination, but with college apps, training and other stuff, this is one of my lesser priorities.
I’ve been training all week and just started to get into the rythm of things, both schedule and fitness-wise. The week generally looked (and will look) like this:
Sundays: Power Yoga(recovery)
Mondays: Train with pre-season swim group, diff. coach; swim 2h, 15min.
Tuesdays: Train at club w/ gpp coach, swim 2h, lift 30-40 min.
Wednesdays: OFF
Thursday: Train at club w/ gpp coach, swim 2h, lift 30-40 min.
Friday: Train with pre-season swim group, diff. coach; swim 2h, 15min.
Saturday: Train at club w/ gpp coach, swim 2-2.5h, lift 45min-1h.
I’m not as happy with the preseason coach, because lots of his workouts are not interval based. So it will just be swim X yards, and then rest Y seconds. This works in theory, but like communism, crumbles in practice. people aren’t motivated to work hard, because they get, say, 20 seconds rest no matter what. And then when some people start going slow, the whole lane gets backed up, and the workout sucks!
But nevertheless, I haven’t seen ALL of his workouts, so I’m willing to keep an open mind for the time being. Anyways, its good for recovery from harder days(aka the club days).
Clemson , I agree on the general lifts and swimming priority,but why the more continuous distances ?
Is 15"/20" interval really perceived as a break by the body,or is it just more of a mean to control the pace and intensity of the swims?
Austin Powers:
When I prescribe let’s say a 3 x (8x100) +15"/3’Rest,Iconsider it a set of single 800m reps,and use the short breaks to control times patterns , stroke numbers and heart rates if needed.
I am having interesting results by trying to use the least sets I can with less than 1:1 to 1:3/4 Work:Rest Ratios during mainly aerobic sessions and with distance oriented swimmers.
To pakewi:
Uhhh…
Well, I’ve seen a lot of distance sets in my experiences, but generally we get less rest per yardage, but intensity is less. I guess this is because the constant, longer swimming improves aerobic capacity, which is what I need right now. Then as Swimming season aproaches, my best guess is that I will start to increase Intensity, but maintain the distance. In turn making me go faster, but the aerobic workload per swim would remain somewhat constant.
But then again I just swim the workouts, I don’t make them.
OK, well I can’t remember all the details of my workouts this week, due to my being the master of procrastination. But I can say that for the past two weeks I’ve not had very good practices. It’s not that I didn’t get my yards in or anything, but my shoulder(s) had been bothering me. I couldn’t train hard, more as a precaution than an inability to swim, which was not the case. The Swimmers Nightmare. It’s like on halloween, instead of kids dressed up as ghosts and stuff, they’re dressed up as operating tools and arms in slings. My problem was when I would pull on the water, I could feel a twinge in my shoulder. I wasn’t sure if it was muscle or joint pain, but salvation came yesterday at practice. There was no pain, and my stroke felt better than its ever been. So we’ll see how I feel at practice today, and maybe I’ll remeber what I did for practice too. I’ll try to post an update when I get back.
Well, last night’s set was all recovery drills. My shoulders felt good, which is good. the set was 100 x 25 @ 40, broken up into groups of 10, with a new drill for each set. I’m still a little sore from the hard training and lifting we did this sunday. Because of the holiday yesterday, we weren’t supposed to have practice at all, so we went to the club to swim as an alterative. We’ll see how my shoulder feels today, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed. Also:
Good for your shoulders…do you perform any exercises to strengthen them,and possibly avoid loaded OH movements in the gym?
The session you mentioned was aimed to technique development or was it more of a “recovery” circuit?
Didn’t your “hard disk” get filled up by repeating 10x10x 8-15 different movements patterns in such a short rest sequence?
I’m asking these because as a Swim Coach I’m interested in every swimmer’s individual feedback.
Well, in addition to being depressed about the red sox, I also was forced to miss practice yesterday(saturday) and today because I was looking at colleges. I also had a time trial Friday which wasn’t so hot. I did a 200 free for real, but by myself. In addition to not feeling the race, my goggles filled up on the dive so the race wasn’t that great. I went 2:05 high, whereas I would feel more comfortable being in the 2:01 - 2:03 range at this point in the season. State qualifying should be around 1:58.50, what it was last year. In addition to that time, I swam a 50 free for fun and got around :26.6, which, for me, means not very much since I wasn’t really racing and It’s not my event at all.
As for shoulder excercise I’m not sure what OH means. In the pool we recover our shoulders a lot by swimming loose backstroke sets between hard and/or long distance free sets. Why we do this can basically be summed up in the analogy of a wind-up toy: Freestyle winds our shoulders up, and makes them tight. To loosen them up, we swim backstroke because its the opposite stroke. the mucsles that contract to produce force in freestyle are now being stretched out and relaxed. In the weightroom a good shoulder excercise is external rotations with a bungee cord. I’m not quite sure why, but when done right it really makes your shoulders feel good.