How is your training going? Let’s put a bit of swimming into your training. This is the best sport to loosen up and to recover actively. The water also acts as compression on your muscles and helps flushing the toxins out…
But swimming is a very uncomfortable sport to do for most of us – we are, after all, land animals! So, here are a few basic tips from the area that seems to cause the most issues…the breathing pattern!
Lots of people think that you just turn your head, suck in air, and go.
Many people like to lift their head out of the water to breath, when in fact you only need to rotate your head to the side, with one goggle still in the water and one out, to get all the air you need. The head can stay in line with the body, at that 30-45 degree angle forward, but just rotated to the side. The head moving through the water creates a pocket of low water, allowing you to breath.
The fastest and most efficient freestyle breath is one that is well timed within the stroke. The proper freestyle breath also doesn’t require too much leaning/laying on the non-breathing arm during the breath. If you’re going to concentrate really hard about a high elbow pull and training this as a habit, make sure you aren’t really laying on the elbow and pressing outward when you breathe. Most often people really lay on opposite arm when the breath, sort of pressing down and out with their arm as one fixed lever. This places lots of extra stress on shoulder and elbow. A high elbow pull is possible when breathing and not, it will just take some practice, a better kick and better core control.
Learn to “glide-breathe-pull’ which means you break down your swimming stroke in 3 separate phases. The glide, then breathing with your arms still at the front and gliding down slightly, then the pull. Most of your mechanics will be focused on forward movements then and not mainly on keeping you out of the water to breathe easier. This might slow down your cadence but over time, you will get used to it, get stronger and your cadence will pick up again.
Please do 5 to 10 min easy jog warm up and warm down & keep running every second day only.
If you want to do extra activities in the middle of those two days, pick something like yoga, Pilates, aqua jogging, swimming, walking or riding…
Monday 20x50m easy free style with fins with 30sec rest between each reps at the pool + 20min easy aqua jog at the pool
Wednesday 90min easy jog L1 inc drills & 10x6min as 2min max, 2min steady, 2min easy
Friday 60min easy jog on grass inc 10x100m as 50m accel sprint & 50m easy jog L1
Sunday 60min easy on the soft surface please inc 10x400m accel to max up hill & recover easy down the hill
Tuesday 30min easy jog on the grass only
Monday 10x100m easy free style with fins with 60sec rest between each reps at the pool. Do each 100m as 25m hard, 25m easy x2 + 20min easy aqua jog at the pool
Saturday 90min easy Jog L1 in hills with 6x1000m hard (90%) on track or in the bush with 200m easy jog. You can also do this by time = 6x4min with 2min easy jog
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