Swim of the Week: Descending 150s, 100s, 75s, & 50s

This week's swim features descending 150s, 100s, 75s, and 50s on relatively short rest. Enjoy!

This is a solid workout in that it helps to develop endurance, but does so with short intervals, short rest, and integrates a conservative amount of harder swimming. The fourth rep at each distance should take you into an anaerobic zone, but the first three should all be aerobic work (though you'll steadily approach the threshold throughout each round, arriving there sometime during #3). The criss-cross nature of this swim is great for swimmers of all types: triathletes, open water swimmers, and competitive swimmers can all benefit from this type of swim. It can also be adjusted for both beginners and seasoned swimmers. Moreover, for the triathletes out there, it's a workout that can be done by both Ironman athletes and Sprint-specialists; both long and short course athletes will benefit from the work accomplished in this set. 

I've left the drill set open as each person needs work in different areas. If you don't know what you need to work on or are drilling aimlessly based off some article you read (or what the guy in the next lane is doing) schedule an appointment with a coach! Attempting to fix your stroke aimlessly is a good way to create more problems than you had to begin with. A good coach can focus your attention on your very own hierarchy of swimming needs.

Beginners - Take the descending element out of this swim and set a rest interval of 20-25". Try to keep the pace of each rep consistent with the rest of the set. If you swim your first 150 in 3:00, try to keep the rest within 5 seconds. Also cut out the 2x200 (and accompanying 50 easy transition), reduce the length of the warm up and consider dropping from four to 2 or 3 reps of the 150s and 100s. If you have questions about how to make this swim work for you, leave me a comment and I'll point you in the right direction.

Warm up
- 300 cruise
- 100 back
- 2x100 kick
- 4x75 strong on 10" rest
- 100 cruise

Drill Set
- 5x100 as 75 drill/25 swim, 20"rest
- 100 cruise

Main Set
- 4x150 descend 1-4 from cruise to strong
- 4x100 descend 1-4 from cruise to strong
- 4x75 descend 1-4 from cruise to strong
- 4x50 descend 1-4 from cruise to strong
- 50 easy backstroke
- 2x200 steady on 25" rest

* Sendoffs: Set the rest interval based off your easy/cruise pace. Take the pace you swim and add 5 seconds to find your send off time. For example, my cruise pace is ~1:18/100. I round that off to 1:20 when setting sendoff times. To set my sendoff interval I would add 5 seconds to this pace (not 5"/100, just 5 seconds overall). For a 150, my sendoff is 2:05 (a 1:20/100 pace = 2:00/150. Take 2:00 + 5" to get a sendoff of 2:05). The sendoffs for the rest of the set are 1:25 for the 100s, 1:05 for the 75s, and :45 for the 50s. Leave a comment below if you need help figuring out your sendoffs.

Cool Down
- 4x50 cruise

Feel free to post your questions, comments, and thoughts after trying this swim in the comments section below!

Finally, if you are interested in setting up a swim session with video analysis, please email kyle@k2eliteperformance.com.