For the past few months, SwimSwam has been posting a daily swimming workout to help inspire swim coaches around the world who are looking for new ideas to try with their swimmers. Since most of the world’s pools are currently closed for business, we wanted to give swimmers and coaches an alternative set of dryland workouts to use to stay fit during the quarantine. These workouts will be designed to be done around the house. Some will use basic equipment, like medicine balls or stretch cords, while others will be all body-weight exercises.
These workouts are provided for informational purposes only.
See more at-home training ideas on our At Home Swim Training page here
Sprints and Power Day
Today’s workout is all about getting your heartrate up via short bursts of energy.
Warmup
You’ll need to have a good workout before doing this power work.
Main Set
While a lot of our workouts have been about strength or flexibility, but it’s important to really focus on getting your heart rate up a few times per week, so today’s workout is about elevating that pulse. If you’ve got a heart rate monitor, we’re looking for 150 BPM +.
30 seconds rest after each activity, unless otherwise noted.
- 15 x – burpees
- 10 x 100 yard sprints, alternating between 100% effort and 80% effort. :60 rest after each sprint
- 3 minutes easy walk – recovery
- 15 x – burpees
- 60 seconds streamline jumps
- 6 x 100 yard jogs, alternating between 70 and 50% effort
- 3 minutes easy walk – recovery
- 6 x – :60 tuck jumps (:30 rest after each rep)
- 3 minutes easy walk – recovery
- 6 x – :60 seconds skaters (:30 rest after each rep)
- 3 minutes easy walk – recovery
Video demonstrating tuck jumps and skaters:
Cooldown
Your legs should be feeling a pretty good burn after that workout. Use this opportunity to get a really good lower-body stretch in.
Here’s a good one, if you’re unsure:
an Olympic level track sprinter would not touch this workout. most of them rarely run even one all out max 100 meter sprint at a practice, let alone multiple ones. and if they do, they are not resting :30 seconds. They would wait to be fully recovered before doing another repeat. If you are able to make it through this workout without being injured, you still didn’t accomplish the goal of gaining speed or power. Max effort does not mean you are building speed.
Completely agree. This is why modern swimming training programs for sprinting have started adopting track-style training methods. For an example, see USRPT for 50m races (which is different from regular USRPT). Unfortunately, a lot of swimmers are still stuck in the 70’s training mindset…
I feel like this should be prefaced by saying that unless you’ve been running and doing speedwork already, you should NOT be doing all-out sprints. That’s just asking for injuries.
Swimmers have hamstrings like piano strings, so it’s a hamstring tear just waiting to happen.
Really? 10 x 100 yard sprints alternating 100% effort with 80% effort with 30 seconds rest between? Ask any well trained track athlete if this is remotely possible
You can definitely do those 10×100 as described. The question is how fast you will be running once fatigue sets in, but you can for sure give the 100%–80% effort.
Then you’re not truly giving max effort. Track aside (and Old Sprinter is definitely right), just look at the ISL skins competition. 22-second race every 3 min, and only Dressel can handle it, and only if he goes 90% on the first one, 95% on the second one. The problem with most swimmers and coaches is they don’t understand what max effort is.