Competitive swimmers can easily swim 2.5 miles without even training for it, even if they haven’t swum in years. Their times may not be the best, but they have a huge advantage over beginner swimmers.
Competitive swimmers know how to move through the water without much effort.
The slower they go, the easier it gets. That doesn’t happen to people with little experience. However, there is a way for a beginner to beat a competitive, out-of-shape swimmer in a 4km race in just 5 months.
Strength. Important?
In a CrossFit competition, they had to swim 400 meters in the sea in the middle of a workout. Many competitors couldn’t finish the swim and grabbed the kayaks. The harder they tried, the slower they moved.
We have helped people who couldn’t finish a single lap, swim without much effort, complete Ironmans, and do what they thought was impossible.
Aaron is going tomorrow to Cancun for his Cozumel Ironman competition.
Five months ago, he couldn’t swim more than 5 meters without stopping. Now he is confident about easily swimming 2.5 miles or 4 km.
As a beginner, the most important thing we told him to focus on was feeling comfortable in the water.
The feeling of gliding through the water, keeping his body long, was priority number one. Rotating in a straight line using his hands as anchor points was the second most important thing.
So, how to swim 4 km without stopping?
Focusing on swimming a lot of distance with bad technique would’ve resulted in an injury or exhaustion, and frustration. There was a bit of frustration, but it never combined with exhaustion.
We knew he was running and biking a lot, so cardiovascular endurance wasn’t an issue.
By giving him a solid swimming technique, it was easy to build endurance for specific upper-body muscles.
Starting the 4th month, he started a 7-week increase in volume and 2 weeks of taper. We still did at least 15 minutes on technique every session. And added one session per week.
And the time he spent on the water increased to 2 hours in the last week before taper.
The kicking sets were our secret weapon. A good set is around 400 meters fast. With variation.
The kick helps stretch and strengthen the core muscles. Especially the hip flexors. These muscles are usually tight in people who sit for many hours every day, and in runners and bikers.
The Importance of the Kick
By working these muscles on this range of motion, we not only helped his swimming but also his running and biking.
Doing hard kicking sets is one of the best ways of building endurance in the water. Remember that even if you are not kicking a lot, you still need to hold the next position for a long time.
A Good Training
The main set started increasing in volume and effort while decreasing overall rest.
- For example, at the beginning of this 7-week phase, he was doing 4 x 100s on a 2:00 pace, resting 30 seconds after each one.
- By week 7 he was swimming 20 x 100s on a 1:40 pace resting only 10 seconds.
Sometimes we did longer swims like 4 x 400. Or 2 x 1000s. That is mainly for mental toughness.
Aaron was able to improve so fast because he had a good technique to rely on.
The last day of training before he flies off to Cancun. He did a total of 400 meters. And the main set was 10 x 25s at a 90% effort, resting 1 minute after each one.
If you have a competition soon or want to try it before going, let us know!
Thank you!