Getting Back in the Pool

This will be my last post because I am no longer able to swim without paying for a gym membership. I know that the past couple posts seemed kinda rushed, and they were because on Saturday, May 11th, we had our last swim meet of the semester and because of that, we no longer have swim practices; so I was trying to get out some of my favorite sets for you guys.

I hope you have enjoyed this several month journey with me on becoming a competitive swimmer again, and hopefully, in the fall, when I am back on the University of Delaware campus, I will start up my blog again for you guys so that you can continue to become a competitive swimmer.

Several posts ago, I talked about tapering. You shouldn’t taper for every meet. Like this senior meet was just a gag meet. It’s like a high school sport senior night event where you honer your seniors for graduating. So I did not end up tapering, instead, I did some intense long workouts like you have seen in the past couple posts.

The last practice I did before the senior meet was a really long one. I got the main part and part of the warm up of this set from the MySwimPro app and I go the warm up set from my friend so I cannot take credit for either of them. But this set will take longer than two hours so I hope you decide to do this set when you have a lot of free time because it is mainly designed to build your endurance.

Before I write the set, you should know three terms: Negative split, Descend, and Best Average.

Negative Split is when you make the second half of your swim faster than the first half. So for example, in this set, there will be a 500 negative split. A 500, if you recall, is 20 laps. So the second ten laps should be faster than the first half. Say you put 80% effort in the first ten laps, then use 90% effort in the second ten laps

Descend means that each repeat you do should be faster than the previous one. So for example, in this set, you will be doing 5 x 100 Descend. The first 100 should be roughly 80% effort, the second one should be 85% effort, the third should be 90% effort, the fourth should be 95% effort, and the last should be 100% effort. You can break it up however you want as long as the next one is faster than the previous one.

Best Average means that you hold one speed. So for example, in this set, you will do 6 x 50 best average. Say I am doing this set, and I do the first 50 on 27 seconds. That means it should be my goal to complete the last 5 by going 27 seconds or faster, not slower.

So now here is the set:

Warm Up:

1000: 400 Free, 300 IM K/D/S, 200 Stroke (best stroke no free), 100 Free No Interval.

10 x 100 Kick on 1:50

12 x 50 IM Transitions (Fly/Back)(Back/Breast)(Breast/Free) Repeat 4 times on :55

Drill Set:

4 x 50 Overkick Free Drill on 1:00 (kick fast, slow arms)

4 x 50 Fist Free Drill on 1:00 (Swim Free with hand in a fist)

4 x 50 Catch Up Drill on 1:00 (How to do catch up drill was in previous post)

Main Set (Repeat 2 x)

4 x 500 Negative Split Free on 6:40

5 x 100 Descend 1 to 5 Free on 1:30

Post Sprint Set (Repeat 2 x):

1 x 200 Negative Split Free on 2:50

6 x 50 Best Average Free on 1:00

Warm Down:

Swim for 5 minutes and relax your muscles.

I hope you like this set, I hope you will use my sets in the future, and I wish you all the best of luck in your aim to become a faster swimmer. Hopefully when I come back onto the University campus, I will start up my blog again for you all. Goodbye.

So for this post, I will be describing a set that should not take more than an hour for a person to complete. There is plenty of distance for you to do as well as some IM work.

First off, for you non swimmers that follow this blog, a 25 is one lap. So by that logic, a 50 is two laps, a 100 is 4 laps, and so on.

This set already incorporates a nice warm up for you to do so there is no need to do one unless you have a lot of time and you choose to do so.

The first part is a 600 freestyle on 7 minutes and 30 seconds. Based on the math above, a 600 should be 24 laps. That means you have 7 minutes and 30 seconds to complete 24 laps. If you finish before the 7 minutes and 30 seconds, then just rest until the time is up. Next, you move into 12 x 25 fly on 30 seconds, kick, drill swim by 25. This means you do a 25 twelve times. The first lap would be kick, the second lap would be whatever drill you choose, and the third lap should be swim. You should repeat that three more times to make twelve.

The next part of the set is a 500 freestyle on 6 minutes and 15 seconds. So again, based on the math, that should be 20 laps. After that, you should go straight into 6 x 50 back stroke on a minute, kick, drill, swim by 50. So the first 50 should be kick, the second 50 should be drill, and the third 50 should be swim. You should repeat that twice for a total of 6 x 50’s

The next part of the set is a 400 yard freestyle. So based on the math, how many laps should a 400 be? you guessed it! 16! You should complete this on the interval 5 minutes. After you complete the 400, you should move to 2 x 150 breaststroke on 2 minutes and 10 seconds, kick drill, swim by 50. A 150 should be 6 laps in a row, and if you break it up by 50, the first two laps, should be kick, the second two laps should be a drill of your choosing, and the third two laps should be swim.

You should be sensing somewhat of a pattern by now in this set, so I will just write out the rest of it for you:

600 Free on 7:30

12 x 25 Kick (K) Drill (D) Swim (S) by 25 on :30

500 Free on 6:15

6 x 50 K/D/S by 50 on 1:00

400 Free on 5:00

2 x 150 K/D/S by 50 on 2:10

300 Free on 3:45

200 IM on 3:00

6 x 100 Free/IM on 1:20

So there was a pattern going, but as you can see, the last two is slightly different than the original pattern. So for those of you that do not know what an individual medley, it is when a single person completes all four strokes in one sitting. So a 200, by the math provided above, should be 8 laps, and there are four strokes, so you guessed it, there are two laps of each stroke. But what is the order of the strokes you should be doing? Well this has kinda been decided and is universal, but the order is butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle. so during the 200 IM, you should do a 50 fly, 50 back, 50 breast, and 50 free.

The 6 x 100 might also be confusing. So the first 100 should be all free, the second should be all IM; and you just repeat that for a total of 6 one hundreds. But this time, during the IM’s, you should be doing one lap for each stroke, as there are four strokes and four laps. But also make sure to keep the order, fly, back, breast, free.

This is a great set to work on your endurance for distance and a good way to to work on your IM’s. But the intervals are pretty hard, so I would recommend that you change the intervals to match your skills.

I hope you like this really long set, and it should take a little less than an hour.

I am not sure if I have mentioned this before, but I am a breaststroker. So lately, I have been working on just breaststroke during breaststroke. For this post, I will be explaining one of my favorite sets that I like to do for breaststroke. These pictures are of breaststroke just in case there are some nonswimmers that follow my posts.

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So my favorite set would be 20 x 50’s. For you non swimmers, a 50 is two laps in a 25 yard pool, or one lap in an olympic length pool. Most of you are probably swimming in a 25 yard pool, so a 50 would be two laps for you, and that means you do two laps twenty times. This set is more of a pace set to build your endurance while getting ample rest, so I like to set the time interval on one minute, which means that you have one minute to do two laps.

Now in this set, I break up the 50’s in two five groups of four. the first 50 in the group of four is easy, or recovery. You should take it nice and slow, take a little break, and try to relax your muscles a little bit. However, you should still be giving maybe 70% of your effort. the second 50, you do one lap of easy with 70% of effort again, but on the way back, you should be sprinting, giving 95-100% of your effort. The third 50 is the exact opposite of the second 50; you do the first lap as fast as you can, giving 95-100% effort while you take the second lap easy, giving 70% of your effort again. The fourth 50 is going to be the hardest 50 because both down and back should be fast, meaning for two laps, you give 95-100% of your effort.

Now I like this set because there is a discrete 50 fast. when you write it out in simple terms, it goes like this: easy easy/easy fast/fast easy/fast fast. The slashes represent the end of two laps, but when you ignore the slashes, there is a broken 50 that many do not recognize. Broken 50’s are great for your endurance as well, but I’ll explain that another time. This set is not very difficult, but I love it because of the discrete 50 in the middle and because of the easy intervals. If done correctly, this set should help improve your stamina for whatever stroke you are doing.

With that being said, I am a breaststroker and I like to do this set as breaststroke, but because the interval is easy enough, you can essentially replace it with any stroke you want, freestyle, backstroke, or butterfly.

I hope you like this set and will consider this set the next time you are in the pool trying to work up your stamina in any stroke really.

I don’t know if any of you have watched the TV show Dragon Ball. It’s a Japanese anime show starring a character named Goku. I was a huge fan from the ages of twelve to fourteen and I used this show as motivation for swimming. So for those of you who have watched it, Goku, the main character, is a martial artist that, in simple terms, strives to be the best and most powerful martial artist. He had no limits and was always getting stronger and more skilled because he constantly trained and pushed his body to the max in order to meet his goal. That is the motivation I used when I was young. third image from here

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This is embarrassing, but when I was super into the show, I told myself I was the real life version of Goku, in terms of having no limits. I did exactly what he did: I never skipped practice, both morning and night practice, and I pushed myself hard everyday because I believed I had no limits. Despite the sore muscles and exhaustion, I desired to be the best of all my friends and pushed myself extremely hard every opportunity I got. I found that when I thought I was Goku, and had no limits in terms of swimming, I was constantly getting faster in swimming. I had a swim meet basically every month, and at each swim meet, I was dropping, at minimum, twenty seconds for every event I swam, even the events I am not good at simply because I had built my endurance in the pool.

When I got older and realized that I am not Goku, that is when I stopped trying as hard as I can at every practice, my speed in the pool steadily got slower, and that was a mistake, obviously, since I again have the desire to be the fastest I can be and to be the fastest.

I think the moral of this story is that you should strive to push yourself hard every time that you’re in the water because that is how you will get better. When I was a senior in high school, I offered this advice to my friend when she asked “how do you go so fast?”: “Don’t skip practice, and push yourself as hard as you can everyday.” I am evidence that practicing like Goku works, not just in swimming, but in any sport. Jut like in running; if you want to get faster at running, you have to push yourself more when running. The most important thing to remember, however, is that you have to want it. You have to want to achieve your goal of being the best if you are going to make it. And the good thing about this goal is that it is never ending. You may achieve the goal of being the best with your friends, but there will always be somebody faster or better that you should be aiming to be better.

Hi, so I know that I am a couple weeks late with an update on getting back into swimming, and I sincerely apologize for that. So instead of just giving an update for this past week, I am going to be giving an update for every week that I missed since my last post.

On the week of March 25th, I had began tapering. For those of you who do not know what tapering is, tapering is when you don’t do intense workouts, rather just swimming to make sure you don’t lose your speed from all your training. I was tapering for a swim meet called Nationals, which is a swim meet for all the college club swim teams in the United States. This year, it was held at Ohio State University from March 29th to March 31st, and this was super exciting because I had never gone so far before for a swim meet. At this meet, there were 120 colleges that participated, and I got to see a lot of my friends from back home who were also doing college club swimming at their schools.

On the week of April 1st, I did not get in the pool because I was on spring break and at home. And unfortunately for me, I no longer had a gym membership and could not get into the pool. But I did do some of the dryland and core workouts, as well as stretching, that I had mentioned in previous updates. But I also added some running to my workouts because cardio is still one of the best workouts you can do, and you don’t need a gym membership to do it, as you can run anywhere, even in place.

On the week of April 8th, I was back at school and was trying to get back into the pool as much as possible. My friend, and the University of Delaware Club Swim President, Aiden Meese best said it: “The only way you’re going to get better is to swim everyday. It doesn’t have to be a hard workout, just get in the pool.” I agree with him because you’re at least working your muscles.

I had once heard this rule of thumb from Coach Aaron, my club swim coach on Occoquan Swimming (OCCS). He said that however long you are out of the pool, let’s use one week for example, it takes double to get back to where you were, which would be two weeks in this example. And so that is why I agree with my friend Aiden when he said that to get better, you just have to get in the pool everyday and do at least a little swimming everyday.

The week of April 14th was the second week back in the pool since my week break of swimming during spring break, and that meant if I wanted to get back to where I was, I had to show up everyday, no matter what. This was extremely hard this particular week because I had two exams to study for. The solution I came up with is to still go to practice, but not stay for the whole time. I stayed for the first 30 minutes, and during those thirty minutes, I pushed myself harder than I could so that I knew I was still getting a good workout in even though I was swimming for less time.

Today is Sunday, April 21st, and I can conclusively say that Coach Aaron’s general rule of thumb is pretty accurate as I am near my old speed and endurance, and the only reason I am not completely back is probably because I was unable to swim during the weekends due to pool closure (again, 😑).

So I think that the take away message for this post should be that no matter what, you should try and get in the pool everyday, even if it is a short time, because if you don’t, it’ll just take longer to get back into good swimming condition, and that just means more work, which is not good.

Alright, so several days ago, I talked about how during the week, I started to do some stretches before bed, because flexibility is not only important for swimming, but also for your health in general. Well this week, I thought it would be a good idea to start doing some core before bed.

I didn’t mention this during the stretching post, but it would be a good idea to do each stretch for three sets, thirty seconds each. If you’re doing a lot of types of stretches, then your stretch routine should take maybe 10-20 minutes. If you add core to your routine before bed, it could add another 10-20 minutes to your before bed routine. So I will suggest this now, before I get into the core, that it may be a good idea to alternate days you do stretches and core. This way, your core has a chance to recover, and and you don’t overstretch your muscles.

I actually don’t like doing sit ups, because that just works your upper core, and that area of your core is pretty easy to work. That is why I like core exercises that work the lower core, because those areas are harder to work.

The first one I like to do is leg lifts, flutter kicks, or six inch leg raise. I combine all three of these because when I do these exercises, the goal is simply to not let your legs touch the ground for one minute. Alternate exercises during the minute, whatever, just do not let your legs touch the ground. Also, when I do these exercises, I let my head rest on the ground and I squeeze my core, like flex it. When I do this, I feel the burn more in my core. But you should keep your head on the ground because according to this site, you could end up hurting your lower back. What I like to do is three rounds with thirty seconds of rest in between each round. If you don’t feel the burn, then you should obviously do some more rounds.

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There is one more core exercise I like to do, and it is side planks. Many people try so hard to get rid of love handles, and I personally think that the best exercise for getting ride of these, is side planks.

It is exactly as it sounds, a plank, but on your side. But there are two ways to do it, on your hand, like the image on the left, or on your forearm/elbow, like the image to the right.

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Now it doesn’t really matter which way you do it, but if you’re like me and have an apple watch, then you must know how annoying it is to do it on your hand and have siri go off because the button is being pressed. So personally, I like doing the side plank on my elbow.

So when I do this workout, I do three rounds of forty five seconds with fifteen seconds of rest in between. But that is because I do it a lot. When I first started doing side planks, I struggled to do three rounds of thirty seconds. That is why, for beginners, I recommend starting off with a time limit that causes that burning feeling, but something manageable.

Hopefully, you decide to start doing core workouts before bed because it is great to get one last workout in before bed, and it’ll make that feeling of finally getting into bed at the end of the day feel even better.

Hi, I would like to formally apologize for the late post this week. I try to do a new post at the end of the week, Sunday, or a post at the beginning of the week, Monday, but I ended up falling behind.

I don’t know who my viewers are, hopefully you all are swimmers, but I do imagine a majority of you have been in college, or will attend college, and so hopefully you understand why I am doing an update so late in the week. I fell behind because of the sheer amount of overwhelming homework and studying I had to do for my first few exams of the new semester.

With that being said, the amount of studying and homework I had to do forced me to decrease the number of times I was in the pool, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t still get my body into good condition.

So for the past week, instead of going to the pool every day to get some laps in, I did one quick and easy thing before I went to bed: stretch.

According to this website, people’s flexibility lessens as they get older. Even with regular training in the pool, our muscles get tighter as we age. But why is flexibility important for swimmers? The same website says that stretching should be incorporated into our workouts for two main reason: the lengthening of individual fibers, and the increase of the range of motion in the joints.

Why do we want longer muscle fibers? In simple words, it allows us to pull with more force when our muscles contracts.

And why do we want to increase the range of motion in our joints? The extra range of motion in our joints allows us to use our whole body rather than just the joints, which in turn creates less turbulence in the water.

Together, the longer fibers and extra range in motion prevents us from becoming stiff and requiring more effort per stroke, which in turn lets us save valuable energy that could be used to swim faster.

Stretching is good for all people, not just swimmers, as it can help with blood circulation, align your body posture, relax you and relieve stress, increase oxygen flow, and enhance coordination. More details about how flexibility helps people can be found here.

But here are two of my favorite stretches for the arms: the arm across the chess, which stretches the shoulders and the upper part of your arm, and the hand on your spine stretch, which stretches your triceps.

There are a lot of leg stretches that I like, but the main one I like is called the inner thigh stretch, which can help with your hip and knee joints. Images, gifs and how to’s of four of my favorite leg stretches can be found at this website here

For the stomach, I love doing the rectus stomach stretch and oblique stomach stretch. This website has the same images as below, but it says that the rectus stomach stretch can help build swiftness in movement while the oblique stretch helps to reduce fat from the abdomens. Personally, I love theses stretches because it just feels good.

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Lastly is a back stretch. I’m not really sure what it is called, but this website calls it the “Prayer Stretch.” I personally love this stretch, and I do it almost all the time, and I have found that when I do it before bed, I wake up and do not have any pain in the lower back muscles. That’s why I love this back stretch. The website above has three other back stretches if you are interested in learned more about back stretches.

Hopefully, I have convinced you, swimmer or non swimmer, to start doing stretches before bed because there are many health benefits along with swimming benefits.

This week was a good week for getting back into the pool because there were no long events that took up all our practice time and so I was able to get in a lot of swimming this week.

In the beginning of the week, we focused on a lot of drills and kicking to get our muscles working out and back into shape, until eventually, by the end of the week, we had moved on to more aerobic workouts and longer yardages.

Everybody has a different body type, and so different workouts affect people differently. That’s why I think that it’s great that the club swim team does not make everyone on the team do the exact same drill. So that is why when I do drills for freestyle, I do the catch up drill (sometimes spelled ketchup drill) or the six kick switch drill.

I like the catch up drill because it gets me to focus on my hand placement while swimming. When you do the catch up drill, you keep one hand in the streamline position (figure farthest right in the image) while the other does a stroke. When the hand doing the stroke finishes, it touches the other hand in streamline position, and when that happens, the hand originally in the streamline position now does the stroke while the hand that originally did the stroke, is now in streamline position. Then you repeat the process. In this drill, it is essentially freestyle swimming, just slowed down so that you can focus on hand placement, and the reason it is called catch up drill is because your hand in streamline position is waiting for the other hand doing the stroke to “catch up” to it. A video demonstration can be found here.

Now, the reason I like the 6 kick switch drill is because it gets me to actually kick when doing freestyle. When I swim freestyle, I am one of those swimmers that has trouble doing flutter kick while doing strokes with my arms. I could never coordinate it that well. And since I haven’t been practicing in a while, it has become very difficult for me to coordinate my kicking and strokes again.

So the way six kick switch drill works is that you do kicks on one side, with your head resting on the shoulder of your arm on that side of your body, which is in streamline position. After you have done six kicks on one side, you switch sides and you keep repeating. A demonstration can be found in this link

So the first week back in the water didn’t go very well. I was only able to get in the water about three times this past week. The first was Monday, February 18th, during the night lap swim time. The second was Tuesday, February 19th, during the first club swim practice of the semester. And the last was Friday, February 22nd, during the morning lap swim time. Why was there no lap swim times or club swim practice on Wednesday and Thursday? Because the high school states swim meet was scheduled to happen on those days. Due to the snow, the high school states meet was pushed back to Thursday and Friday of the week, but the snow also, unfortunately, closed the pool on Wednesday. I was still able to get some laps in Friday morning solely because the meet was supposed to take place at night.

The lack of ability to swim this week was really frustrating because I actually had a club swim meet yesterday, Saturday, February 23rd. I did not expect myself to do well because of the lack of practice, but to my surprise, I made a nationals cut in the 50 yard breaststroke. I actually made it by several seconds.

But here is why I think I actually did better than I thought:
I had gone to the gym and worked out so that my muscles didn’t get weak and out of shape for the meet.

But there’s something I would really like to say about working out in the gym for swimmers. When someone works out at the gym, they’re always doing workouts that require them to push. For example, the bench press, leg press, or push ups. Swimmers need to focus on the pulling motion. During practice, a coach often writes “pull set” on the sheet. Why? Because you’re pulling through water to move. So the more pulling workouts you do, the more in shape your arms become for swimming.

That is why I highly recommend that you do a pulling workout that has movements extremely similar to the Vasa Trainer Pro. You do not need to purchase one, just copy the movement with a bungee cord like the person is doing on the second image. When you get a bungee cord, just tie the opposite ends of the handles to an object and pull in a similar fashion to the way you would do a stroke in the water. The further back you stand, the more resistance you should feel.

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For your legs, I highly recommend some squat jumps. I have often found this exercise great for mimicking both the motion of pushing off the walls in the pool and jumping off the blocks. The higher you jump, the better, because it means that you can push off the walls harder and jump further out.

I hope that you find these workouts helpful for getting back into swimming shape and that you give some thought to the whole idea of pushing vs pulling workouts in the gym.

I used to be a competitive swimmer since I was ten years old. However, when I was a senior in high school, at age 18, I had grown really tired of all the swimming. From Monday through Friday, I would be swimming for one and half hours before school and 2 hours after school. On Saturdays, I would be swimming from 6-8:30 am. This schedule was consistent 11 months of the year; the only month that we received off was August.
That is why I had decided to quit swimming my senior year of high school. I wanted to take a break from the consistent training and go out with my friends to the movies or do some other activity for a change.
But now that I am in college, I realized how much I really missed swimming. Sure the hours and nonstop training was rough, but now that I actually have so much free time, I realized that swimming is a great hobby or activity to do on a regular basis. So during my first semester of college, I decided to join the club swim team, and it was great because the practices were not as intense as they used to be when I was home, and the easy practices actually ended up being a great stress reliever and a way to clear my mind when I felt overwhelmed.
But then another thing happened to me, I had grown very weary of the easy practices, and instead, had grown a desire to swim intensely, and to push myself as hard as I can in swimming.
Lots of my friends are in the same position as me: they are tired of the intenseness, but then suddenly miss it after quitting.
Even the great Michael Phelps went through this. After the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Phelps had grown tired of swimming, according to a USA Today post titled “Michael Phelps talks about ‘downward spiral’ leading to his DUI arrest”
Swimming requires a lot of work, especially to get back to the speeds you used to have, so that is why I have decided to start writing this blog. This blog will be about how to get back into competitive swimming for swimmers that had quit, but had recently decided to start again. This blog will mainly contain sets, drills, and dryland workouts that I find online as well as personal tips from experience that I find really helpful to get back into the swimming groove.

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