Monday Recovery Swims

Monday’s can be terrible after a big weekend of training and the last thing you want to do is get out of bed at 5 am to get to the pool, but in saying that there is a fine line between getting training done and overtraining, the 6 months I spent training in Phuket with the Z-Coaching crew I was almost guaranteed to miss a Monday swim session on a 3 or 4 weeks cycle due to fatigue, the 180kms rides in the heat and humidity played a big part but mainly the overload and fatigue set in that I was better off staying in bed and rest than turning up and struggling to swim with bad technique, but Jurgen zack coach at Z coaching and now retired 7 times Ironman champion would say I’m soft, they don’t breed us Aussies as tough as the germans.

After a 4-week training block I definitely don’t get up at 5 am for swimming but I do the session done usually mid-morning, I wouldn’t swim anything under 3kms even as a recovery session my thoughts are if I can’t swim 3kms I may as well have the day off (this would be different if your only swimming 2-3kms per session) usually I swim any ware between 3.5kms for a speed set, 4kms for threshold and 5kms aerobic possibly more training for long course.

This is a good Aerobic volume set if you didn’t want to burn your self out for a quality week on a Monday, depending on the ability of the time, I wouldn’t generally add drills at end of set but some times its good to change things up and really focus on your drill form as everything is really activated, some times drills at the start is hard to get right for me I don’t really feel good swimming until 2000m some times 3000m as I’m not a natural swimmer.

W/U 200-400m

MAIN

3-5 sets x 1000m  (250m swim-250m add P/B-500 add paddles)

30 sec rest each 1000m, quick stop to add P/B and paddles.

swim all at an easy Aerobic pace focus on technique

DRILLS

4-6 X 100M

(6/1/6-Finger drags-fists-swim)

5 sec rest

C/D 200-400m

The next swim session is the one I use when I’m totally cooked but don’t want to miss a swim session generally on week 3 or 4 of a periodized training block, I’m a big fan of paddles for building strength endurance and getting a really good feel for the water but if your not conditioned to paddles you can do without just focus on arm cadence more, the number of 100’s you do will generally depend on ability along with the time cycle, I would do 20 x 100m on 1:50 min this gives me about 10-sec rest and the second half I find the body wakes up and you speed up with 20-30 sec rest.

W/U 200-400m

DRILLS

10x 50’s (25 fists-25 swim build)

MAIN

14/16/20 X 100 (Aerobic with paddles)

2:10/2:00/1:50mins

C/D 100-200 (easy add back)

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