What to do with the half-hour swim
Every once in a while, you can only get to the pool for half an hour. Admit it. At least if your life and the pool hours are like mine.
I generally feel like it's still worth it to go for 30 minutes, if for no other reason than to keep up the frequency. But 30 minutes is really my lower limit.
My question to you all is, assuming you had only 30 minute to swim, what would you do? I see three potential short workouts:
- Essentially a HIM race rehearsal swim. Quick warmup, then long continuous moderately hard swim...
- 10 minute warmup, then a bunch of very fast 50s with rest or alternating fast 50s and active recovery 50s with very short rest
- 10 minute warmup, then a main set of "hold for best possible average" 100s with 10-15 sec rest between, i.e., a threshold set.
Something else? Just curious as to your thoughts.
William
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But as a generic efficient use of time for triathlon specific training, I would go,with 5 min warm up, 2 min of paddle work, 8 min @ Oly/ HIM race pace, and finish with 13 50s on one minute, 2 min cool down.
Great question, I often find myself with around 45 mins in the pool and wondering the same thing.
My abbreviated work-
Ten min warm up, followed by 400 meters of 25 slow, 50 fast, 400 meters of the paddles,400 meters of a drill, ending with a 400 cool down focusing on form.
Yes, I think it does depend somewhat on where you are in the training cycle, but for a short workout, I think it depends less on that than a regular 60-75 minute workout does. I think the question is how do you get some good training effect out in the brief time you have...something making it worth your while to actually get to the pool. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's why I posed options as generically: a sprint workout, a 1-set threshold workout, or a 1-piece endurance workout.
(Perhaps I should have been clearer...since I have lived with teenage competitive swimmers, "10 minutes warmup" (or 20 or 30 or 40) might actually be a fairly complicated set...I didn't mean necessarily 10 minutes of just generic slow swimming.)
Where I wonder is the kind of set that Bryan and Jay describes. He's got one 400 yd speed set, and then 3 x 400 moderate intensity doing different things. To me, that feels more like what I'd want to do over a longer workout (multiple 400s), but maybe that's because I'm not swimming 2000 yards in 30 minutes like it appears Bryan may be capable of. I'm not going to swim more than 1500-1600 yards in 30 minutes unless it's extremely low rest and no drills/kicking. That's why I had kicked around the notion of essentially that 1500 "race rehearsal" type swim if I were going for an endurance set. I feel like 300s-400s for me would end up being gray-zone in a brief workout.
For the record, of course I thought of this today because it was my real situation. :-) And it seems I was channeling Al...
I did 300 swim, 300 as alternating 25s kick/swim-hard all with a snorkel, and then filled out the rest of my time with hard 50s on the minute...however many that was (15+). That's too little rest for me to genuinely sprint all of them, but maybe more than a true threshold workout should have been.
Background to my suggestion...I'm assuming the most effective means of improving fitness in a short time is via the most intensive effort possible. To me, that's "all out for 45 seconds (or less)", irrespective of the sport. But you can't do that for the full 30 minutes - maybe 10-15 minutes of work time is all the body can use on any given day. So you gotta fill the rest of the time with rest or stroke work. Thats what the 4-500 is about at the start. Then, it takes me, at least, about 5 minutes to get the diesel up and running so I can actually do real work.
If that doesn't suit for what ever reason, then the FTP wko is where I would go.
William,
I apologize for jumping in on your 30 min swim forum, i should have started a new thread " what to do with 40-45 min swim". I din't mean to imply that I was capable of swimming 2000 meters in 30 mins.
Regards,
Bryan