People in our swimming group have been asking me, why do we only swim shorter intervals when I’m gonna be doing an Olympic distance or a half iron man distance triathlon, ultimately I’ve got to swim 1500 metres or 1900 metres.
Well, the answer to that question is you can control your stroke mechanics better over 50 metres to let’s say, maximum 200 metres.
What we’re looking for as coaches and improving our athletes is having more, better strokes.
So we’re going for quality rather than quantity.
The longer you swim for, particularly if you are not very fit or your time crunching and you don’t have a lot of time to spending the water.
The longer you swim for, the more your stroke will deteriorate towards the end and it’ll become much less efficient.
You’ll find that it takes you longer, makes you more tired, and you hate swimming even more than you do.
Fundamentally, 1500 metres is exactly the same as doing 30 lots of 50 with maybe a short rest in it.
It’s better to do a shorter reps for the same distance and have more, better quality strokes, than swimming until your knackered.
