Improving Swim Performance using Swim Thresholds
It is September, the tri season is winding to a close. Athletes will be transitioning from their favorite swimming hole back into the pool. With that, it is time to move back to structured workouts. So when coaching a group of swimmers with a diverse range of abilities, how do you develop workouts that challenge the athlete to continue to improve? As a coach, I want to steer clear of assigning generic workouts without timed intervals because I want to give athletes something pace-appropriate to strive for while helping them develop a sense of pacing. However, it’s not time-effective to write a customized workouts for each athlete. So how do we balance this?
The answer I came up with is to test an athlete using a 10-minute max effort swim to establish a swim threshold, determine a pace group, then assign two months of workouts based on that threshold pace. We have a set of workouts for every :05 from 1:10 to 2:30/100 yards.
All of the workouts are one hour with two workouts per week for nine weeks. One workout is focused on endurance. This is generally done on a Monday and doubles as an active recovery. The second workout is a speed workout at (or faster than) your current threshold, preparing you for your next threshold test. At the end of the nine weeks, we retest and generally see athletes move up 1-2 pace groups. If the athlete starts to stagnate, then it’s time to get eyes on them in a one on one session to see if something in their technique that is holding them back.
One of the things I have found is that athletes, especially those not coming into triathlon from a swimming background, have a difficult time pacing a 10-minute max effort. Therefore, we break the the effort up into a “set” on a minimal amount of rest (e.g. the 2:00 pace group does 5x 100 at 2:00). We take the average pace from the set and use that for the athlete’s swim pace threshold/pace group. (Technically, a pace threshold should be the pace the athlete can hold for an hour. However, where pacing tends to be difficult for triathletes, the pace held for 10-minute effort doesn’t tend to be much faster than that held for a 60-minute effort. Second, I feel TrainingPeaks over-estimates swim TSS slightly and by using a slightly faster time as the threshold it deflates those numbers a bit.)
Ready for your first test set?
Warm up
For this test we want to make sure you are thoroughly warmed up, so we’ll do a 15-minute warmup with some sprints. This will be more generic than our typical workout as we don’t know what your fitness level is yet.
5-minutes, easy swim, resting if needed
5-minutes of 100’s on 15 seconds rest. Sprint the last 25 of each 100
5-minutes straight swim
From the last 5-minute swim, take your average pace and round to the nearest 15 seconds to determine which test set to perform.
Test Set
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4x 100 on 2:30
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4x 100 on 2:15
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5x 100 on 2:00
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4x 150 on 2:40
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3x 200 on 3:00
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3x 300 on 3:45
If you miss an interval, take 5 seconds rest before attempting the next interval. Record the times for each interval, take the average, round up to the nearest :05 seconds and use that as your swim threshold/pace group.
Cool Down
Swim for 5-10 minutes easy working on form.
Now that we’ve established your pace group, not only can we structure workouts around it, but we can also predict performance at different distances.
To get started with our swim workouts, they are available for purchase on TrainingPeaks.
Example workouts
1:40 pace group speed workout
Warm up
1x 500 swim
4x 100 on :15 rest- 25 easy/25 sprint
Main Set:
6x 100 on 1:50
1x 600 easy on 30" rest
6x 100 on 2:15 sub 1:40
Cool down: 300 swim
1:50 pace group endurance workout
Warm Up
400 easy
4x 100 build (last 25 sprint) on 15" rest
Main Set:
2x 800 on 16:15
Cool Down: 300 swim
Your swim threshold can also be used to estimate your swim split. Athletes in a wetsuit tend to average 100% of the swim threshold for a sprint, 98% for an Olympic 95% for a half-iron and 88% for an iron-distance event. Using the table below, you can get an estimate of your swim time.
