Now that I did a mile, shorter sets?

I very rarely swim more than 200m without a rest.  Might be a 5 second rest, but still a rest.  I do mostly 50's, 100's and 200's (LCM) and every few weeks swim longer; open water if I can.

Mix up 50, 100 and 200's and also mix it up buy doing faster sets with pull bouys, flippers. kick boards, bands, paddles etc to keep it interesting.

20x 100 !!

BORING!! 

i personally like ladders to keep me interested, or repeating sets

but yeah, if you can swim that far striaght, you need to be working on speed.

50s, 100s, 200s at most right now.

there are a million and one ways to work them into sets.

sets with little rest (5-15 sec) will build endurance/threshold levels
sets with a lot more rest, 30 sec-2 min depending on distance will build top end speed.

work some of both in, much more of the first.

desending sets are also fun.

something like 4x100 on 2:00 (where you have 2 min to do the swim and rest, so if it takes you 1:30, you have 30 sec of rest)
then 4x100 on 1:45
4x100 on 1:30

keep dropping time off the interval until you cant do it anymore.

some hard pull and kick sets are fun too and will help your swimming.
one like is:
good long warmup, mostly swimming for this.
main set x4
400 hard pull with paddles
200 hard kick with flipper (alternate kicking on back, with board every set).

for speed sets, i like to go one of two ways.

long sets of 50s, anywhere from 20-40 of them. mind numbing workout, but at least for me it works well. i keep rest about as long or just longer than the swim pace.

or, the other speed workout i like is something like:
4x100 on 2:30 (coming in around 1:05-6)
4x75 on :45 rest
5x100 hard kick with flippers
10x25 sprint, 20 sec rest.

endurance sets a lot easier and are more limited to getting paces right and how creative you are or how much tourture you can endure on the boredom front.

Get the Swim Workouts in a Binder for Triathletes book.

It has all the workouts you would ever need and is made to sit pool side.

Or check out the USA Swimming Masters pages/forums.  You will find a ton of workouts there.

Could you provide a link?

I went there, but it seemed like I needed to be a USASM member to get to those forums.

http://www.ncmasters.org/woprevious.html

Thanks!!!

And while I know great swim workouts never go out of style... it's interesting that the page was last updated in 2002.

Cool, I think I will try the desending sets in the morning after work.  I seem to be around the 2:30 to 2:40 range on my just keep swimming sets.  So for the set descending sets, I should pick a time, like 2:20 to start and work on speeding up from there or just say screw it and suck it up and start at 2:00.
Joe

for the desending sets (assuming you were looking at mine and not someone elses),

i try to start out on something relatively easy.

so for me doign them on the 2:00 min gives me approx 40 sec of rest, or a bit more (coming in around 1:20 or just under).

so pick something that gives you 35-45 sec of rest for hte first ones. do a few there, drop 5-10 sec off the rest, do again.

the first interval at least until you get used to it should be a bit easier.
the more you want to swim that day, the slower the first should be, and the smaller the time chunks you knock off the rest.
ie if you want to do a lot,
start at 2 min, next at 1:55, next at 1:50 etc etc (2-4 at each time interval)

if you have little time/shorter workout, do a few one 2:00 or 1:50, then drop to 1:30, etc.


for the most part you can make this up as you go as along as you have a goal for the workout, there are no exact numbers you need to follow. just get the rest right, and the effort right, and you could be doing sets of 75, 150, 200, etc.