Give us your best!

My personal favorite swim workout is any one that involves me getting my body wet.. That said, I found this workout by Wes Hobson to be quite useful..

Favourite swim workout is the spa pool recovery.

Love 100IM's (burn fest) and a crazy set SKIPS - Swim, Kick, IM, Pull, Swim.

I'm just glad to be able to swim at all at the moment! I've sprained my ankle and can't run or cycle (I can't twist my foot out of my clipless pedals!)

Just off to the pool for some 400s.....

The IM Simulator (once a month). A legendary session among Strasbourg ironmen. The workout is 3800m long and simulates the dry land warm up, fast start, cruising speed and a transition while fatigued required in an ironman.

Poolside warm - up with arm swings and elastics.

4 * (150 fast + 800 ironman pace). 1 Minute between repeats.

Simulate a full ironman transition after the 4th repeat. In the winter we swim this in a 50m pool so do the transition without a bike. However, in the summer we do the session in a lake and make a full transition onto the bike for a few km.

This set is a modification of one of Gordo's 400 ME sets link gives full set (Click for the Link ...)

Main set is:

8 X 400’s – see note below

Base R:10

Base -10

Base -20

Base -30

Base +10

Base -10

Base -30

Base -50

Rest 1 min

Base time can start easy or slightly quicker pace for more challenging workout. Idea is that (Base -30 ) is challenging.

Note time for first 400, Base is time taken + 10s

One of my favourite swim sets and is easy to keep track of is a ascending and descending ladder. Do WU with a mixture of 100FS, 2x25 Drills 50BS 2x25 Drills, 50BR 2x25 Drills. Do ascending with paddles and pull buoy then descending swim only. For a challenge, flip between easy, mod, mod hard, easy....

50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, 450, 400, 350, 300, 250, 200, 150, 100, 50 then WD.

Like the above, pyramid set. 50, 100,150,200,250,200,150,100,50; alternate pull bouy and swim. This is a 1250 set, so can be done for a short session or repeated. For IM training up to 400 takes it to 2950, including warm up and warm down thats the IM distance done.

My favorite self-prescribed workout (usually on Saturday afternoons) is kind of like Geoff's, but I do 400s alternating swim with kick/pull buoy, with ~1:00 recovery between...depending on how much time leading to the next "top." Usually I can get 3600 in a little over an hour.

Had a 3600-4000 yd set like this I could do in 1:15-20, but it was 400 s/k/p - too much playing with toys and not enough swimming, so I made it more challenging.

Maybe another swim topic but pullbuoys - more harm than good?

I personlally hate the things, too many triathletes going up and down the pull with a float in between their legs for no reason.

I think they're got there place in teaching people to swim, isolating the stroke or picking up faults. But endless repeats is just wrong in my mind.

A good point, Gary. I like using the pull buoy as a relative recovery portion of that swim, so I'm not panicking, tightening up, losing form.

I do a masters' workout three times a week, so the Saturday swim is part recovery workout, part endurance workout. The hope is to get it down to the point where the vast majority of my Saturday stuff is swim...incremental variation toward a bunch of 400s, all swim...next goal to make the repeats a little longer and perhaps be doing a single non-stop swim of 3600 to 4000 yards by September.

My winter base set to get back to swim fitness is as follows:

400 warm up vary stroke and drills.

20 x 50m of 1 minute.

100m easy back-stroke.

10 x 100m of 1.50mins.

100m easy back stroke.

5 x 200m of 3.30mins.

400m cool down as backstroke and breast stroke.

most important thing is to keep the same timing for each rep.