Work Out Routines for Swimmers

Swimming offers a full-body workout and is an excellent activity for fitness or weight loss. Since swimming is non-impact and not weight bearing, it is an especially forgiving activity appropriate for those recovering from injury, elderly and overweight athletes who may not be able to participate in land-based aerobics. Planning your swimming workouts beforehand reduces boredom and ensures that you reap the maximum fitness or weight loss benefit from your time in the pool.

  1. Warm-up

    • Begin your workout with a 10 to 20 minute warm-up. Warming up raises the temperature of your muscles, resulting in quicker nerve impulses and faster muscle contraction. Warming up also dilates the blood vessels, increasing blood flow and oxygen delivery to your working muscles. Finally, a warm-up increases the secretion of synovial fluid (the lubrication in your joints), reducing stiffness and allowing you to use your full range of motion.

      Begin your warm-up with several minutes of easy swimming. Then, as your nerve passageways wake up, begin focusing on finer motor skills with technique drills. Drills ingrain good technique into your muscle memory, resulting in better swimming through the rest of your workout. Before you move on to your main set, do some short bursts of intense swimming. For example, do 5 sets of 50 yards (two lengths in a 25-yard pool), swimming each 50 faster than the last. Fast swimming raises your heart rate and prepares your cardiovascular system for the intense effort to come.

    Main Set

    • The main set usually practices a specific skill. For example, a distance swimmer or triathlete might do longer intervals at a low intensity with short rests. A sprinter does short, intense sets designed to improve their lactic acid tolerance. IM (individual medley--a combination of the butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle) specialists usually break the IM into parts, practicing each individual stroke, or two strokes at a time before putting it all together.

      Swim workouts are usually designed on an interval that keeps the swimmer's effort in check. Sometimes the workout describes exactly how much rest goes after each interval (for example 10 sets of 100 yards with 10 seconds rest), but more often the workout gives a "sendoff" time. A main set may be 10 sets of 100 with a 1:30 sendoff. This means that whether the swimmer completes the interval in 1:15 or 1:29, they still leave for the next interval a minute and thirty seconds after they started the last one. That way, the harder you swim, the more rest you earn.

    Cool-down

    • A cool-down (or "warm-down") is active recovery that clears the byproducts of intense exercise like lactic acid from the muscles. A cool-down reduces soreness and enhances recovery. At the end of your workout, swim slowly for a few minutes. Cooling down with a kickboard or a pullbuoy lets you incorporate extra technique work into your workout. Cool down using a stroke that emphasizes the opposite muscles from those used in your main set. If your workout was mostly freestyle, swim backstroke; if you swam mostly butterfly, swim breaststroke.