Swim Smooth believe that every session you do should have a balance of 3 elements – technique, fitness and open water specific training. If you are swimming three times a week we suggest you hit this sort of routine:
1x Technique orientated session
1x Endurance biased session with longer steady paced swim sets
1x Quality session working on your threshold speed
Each of those sessions will contain a little of the 3 elements technique/fitness/open water skills, but the amount of each will vary between the sessions.
Worried about getting this right? You need one of our training plans to follow!
Your Quality swim Sets
For distance swimmers – including open water athletes and triathletes – one physiological factor is all important: your lactate threshold. If you can improve your lactate threshold speed your race speeds will improve. Your ability to sprint or work anaerobically above threshold is largely irrelevant in distance swimming and triathlon. So is your ability to lift heavy weights.
For most swimmers, the change to CSS sets will mean more swimming and less recovery.
Here’s the secret: To improve your lactate threshold you want to do your quality swim sets at your current threshold pace or just below it. Many athletes make the mistake of training above lactate threshold in short sharp swim sets – that isn’t nearly as effective. We’ll explain more about getting that right below.
Lactate Threshold, Threshold and CSS
In the training and coaching world we often shorten ‘lactate threshold’ to just ‘threshold’ – it means the same thing. In a laboratory we’d measure your threshold by taking small samples of your blood as you exercise at increasing intensities and look for the characteristic kick up in blood lactate when you reach your threshold swim speed. Blood tests like that are expensive and tricky to perform in a wet environment, fortunately there is a better way to find your threshold speed. Enter CSS.
CSS is an acronym for Critical Swim Speed. It’s an approximation of your lactate threshold speed and you can find it by doing a couple of swimming tests (no blood involved – just a stopwatch!). It’s not precisely the same as lactate threshold but it will be within a couple of seconds per 100m, which is plenty accurate enough to guide your training.
Test To Find CSS
The CSS test involves two timetrial swims – a 400m and a 200m. Before attempting these swims perform a thorough warmup and a small build set to get you used to swimming fast.
Do the 400m timetrial first, it’s less likely to effect the 200m than the other way around. Recover completely between each timetrial with some easy swimming. Perform both timetrials from a push off from the wall, not a dive.
Try and pace the trials as evenly as possible, don’t start too fast and slow down. If you’re not sure get someone to take your 100m splits – they can be very revealing.
Calculate your Critical Swim Speed (think threshold speed) using the calculator
Read more: http://www.swimsmooth.com/training.html
