The Advantages of Swimming Sprints Vs. Distance

Swimming can improve your muscular strength, flexibility and cardiovascular efficiency. Both sprint and distance swimming can easily be implemented into your training regime. While both types of swimming have their advantages, each will affect your physiology differently, playing complementary roles in your overall training goals. Sprint swimming can affect muscular strength and anaerobic endurance, while distance swimming can benefit aerobic endurance and stroke technique.

  1. Physical Strength

    • Swimming of any kind will develop your overall muscular strength, but sprint and distance swimming each develop different types of strength. Primarily when you sprint, your body engages fast-twitch muscle fibers, which respond quickly but tire easily. In contrast, distance swimming requires your body to employ slow-twitch muscle fibers, which can perform longer, but at less intense levels.

    Endurance

    • Swimming is an aerobic sport where a constant supply of oxygen is needed to sustain a particular effort. Sprinting can cause you to enter an anaerobic state, where your body uses more oxygen than you may be able to take in. Thus, sprints will improve your anaerobic endurance. Conversely, distance swimming will develop your aerobic endurance. Over time, this will allow you to swim longer distances at a faster pace. Resting adequately between swim sets and practices will allow you to avoid injury and fully recover.

    Interval Training

    • Whether you swim competitively or only for fitness purposes, workouts in the pool can become long, solitary, and quite monotonous. When developing a swim training program, interval training will help ensure that you are properly challenging yourself; it is also a great indication of your progress. It can also make individual sessions more challenging and interesting. When doing interval training, you develop workouts that incorporate both sprint and distance sets on timed intervals. For example, if you swim three days per week, day one can have a sprint interval set to swim, day two an easy swim day, and day three a distance interval set.

    Flexibility and Stroke Mechanics

    • Whether swimming sprints or distance, it is important to maintain proper flexibility and stroke technique. This will be much easier to do when distance swimming, as strokes are longer and slower. Swimming with proper technique and flexibility can be challenging, but once you develop proper swimming technique at a slower, distance pace, you should challenge yourself to swim with the same mechanics and flexibility at a faster pace. Always swim at least a few hundred yards as a warm-up prior to swimming particularly challenging swims.