It’s impossible to hold your top speed for 1,000 meters. But you can build up endurance to maintain, let’s say, your 75% speed over longer and longer distances.
Let me talk a little more about endurance so I can give you the best swimming workout to build your endurance.
Endurance Swimming Facts
When you swim at top speed, you are spending energy from your muscles faster than you can replenish it. So that causes fatigue, and you will start swimming slower and slower as you get more and more tired.
As you might know, some people are faster over short distances but cannot hold it very long, and some people are slower over short distances but can hold their speed longer because they have better endurance.
What does it mean?
Building up your endurance simply means that you are trying to maintain a certain speed for longer periods of time.
Even if you improve a little bit, let’s say a .1 meters per second in the 1,500, that is a 35.8 seconds faster swim.
4 Keys to Improve Your Swimming Endurance
To give you the perfect endurance workout, we need to look at the 4 main adaptations that your body needs to go through in order to hold speed for longer:
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The lungs need to transfer oxygen more efficiently to the blood.
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Your heart needs to pump blood harder to the muscles.
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Your muscles need to use energy more efficiently, and they need to be stronger to be able to do that.
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You need to have better control of your body to be able to move with a better swimming technique.
Most people start with numbers one and two, swimming longer and longer distances to build up that cardiovascular efficiency.
But I would say number 4 is actually more important, and number 3 is very underrated.
Let’s Work Out
So if you want to start having more control of your body and at the same time start working on hidden muscles that will help you swim faster, here is a good workout to try and practice.
We will have to keep it simple and a little open for interpretation, so you can adapt this workout to you.
And because one workout will obviously not increase your endurance, I’ll give you variations of the workout that you can repeat for at least 6 weeks without getting bored. Click here.
Every time you swim this workout, I want you to CHANGE something.
While you rest, try to breathe through your nose. This is probably the most important thing if you want to increase your lung and heart capacity and efficiency.
During warm-up up you can change the stroke you are swimming. You can do freestyle, breaststroke, or backstroke, but don’t do butterfly because it is too difficult to do during warm-up.
Try to do a better average time for the 200s every time you do the workout. It would be helpful to have a smart watch that takes your time if you don’t have a coach who can do that for you.
You can download the complete explication of the workout HERE.
You can do this workout a maximum of three times a week, while having proper resting days, eating well, hydrating during your swimming, sleeping well, working on other things, and avoiding sprints.
And if you want that extra improvement, you have to try working out with me on our dry-land channel. But we suggest doing this one a maximum of three times a week.
Try these workouts in your training and tell us how they work for your endurance!
Thank you!