Welcome to team swimfast

Warm Up
Your warm ups are designed to get you wet, loose and comfortable in the water. They should warm up your muscles and elevate your heart rate a little bit before you get into the meat of the workout.
You’re going to see easy swimming, some fast sprinting and some breathing work in the warm ups. You’ll also get to work through descend sets and some open water skill specific work.

Skills & Drills
Swimming can be complicated. There are a lot of moving parts… Your breathing is limited. There are so many things to think about when you envision that “perfect stroke”. It can be really overwhelming to try to get everything right all the time.
This is why we do drills. A good drill is a deconstructed piece of the freestyle stroke. Designed to isolate a movement or a position to help you learn more effectively.
Each session you will be given drills that align with the stroke faults we have identified in your video analysis review.

Main Set
I like to think of the Skills and Drills set as the architectural piece of your workout. It’s the piece where we craft and design your stroke to be efficient and fast.
The main set is the building and testing piece.
The main sets of your workouts will focus on building your swimming engine and teaching you to maintain good form when fatigued. These sets (along with everything else in your program) is being individually designed and structured to help you achieve your specific goals. The closer you are able to stick to plan, the better the results you will get! To read more about your main set goals, click here.

Cool Down
The cool down is designed to loosen you up and stretch you out after a tough session. It will help you flush your body, reduce your heart rate, relax and set you up for success in your next session.
You should emphasize great technique during your warm down. The stroke you use here is what your body will remember doing last when you leave the pool. The better your stroke ends today, the better it will start next session!

The main set is where the work happens.

This is the part of the workout that is tailored to build your endurance, increase your speed, teach you how to swim with great technique under fatigue and how to pace appropriately.

🔸 Your primary goal with any main set set is to be as consistent as possible with the pacing. I look at the variation between your fastest repeat and your slowest. The less deviation, the better!

🔸 Equally as important as your pace, is your rest. The rest times prescribed on these sets are almost as important as the goal times – please pay attention to them and make sure you stick to them. If you can’t then I’ve set the goal times incorrectly.

Not all main sets are created equal. Some will be short and fast. Some will be long and hard and there will be many variations in between. To make sure you are getting the full benefit in these main sets, you need to follow the instructions laid out for you as best you can.

While I keep my workouts as simple as possible for you to follow, there are some key words and phrases you will need to understand in order to get maximum benefit out of your sessions. Here’s what they are:

Negative Split
Negative Split simply means the second half of the distance is swum faster than the first. So whatever distance I ask you to swim, divide it in 2. Make sure the second half of that repeat is faster than the first half. That generally means you will need to swim a little slower (perfect for transferring your good technique from the drill sets to the main sets) on the first half and then pick up the pace on the second half. For example if I ask you to Negative split a 100, you will swim the second 50 faster than the first 50.

Build Swims
Build Swims are similar to negative split swims. Negative splits have a clear black and white line separation between the second fast half and the first easy half. Build sets are a little more gray. You’ll simply build the speed as you go through the swim. For example if you have a build 100, you might get faster every 25. Or if you have a build 50 you might get faster every 6 strokes. You can decide how you build the swim, but it should start slow and then build up to speed as you go through it.

Descending Sets
Descending Sets require you to swim increasingly faster as the set goes on. So instead of Negative splitting each individual repeat (like the 100) I want to you to make each 100 faster. For example if we have a set of 4 x 100 I want number 1 to be your slowest 100 and number 4 to be your fastest. Each 100 will be faster than the 100 before.

Golf Sets
Golf or Swim Golf is a drill we use to help improve the efficiency of your stroke. It is a very simple way to find the balance between Distance Per Stroke & Speed for your stroke.

I will usually have you do 50’s when we do Golf swims. To complete a Golf Set here’s what you will do:

Try to complete each 50 as quickly as you can with the lowest possible stroke count.
You’ll need to count your strokes (A stroke counts each time one of your hands hits the water. Right = 1, Left = 2, Right = 3 etc.)
You’ll also need to time yourself for the 50
Your Golf score is the time you take to complete the 2 lengths (in seconds) + the number of strokes you take.

It doesn’t matter what your score is to start with. That’s just where you are at right now, there is no “good” or “bad”. It just is.

You know you are becoming more efficient if one of three things happens during your golf swim sets:

● You lower your golf score
● You hit the same score with a lower perceived effort level
● You hit the same score with a lower average heart rate (if you track HR during your swims)

Improvements in any of these 3 areas will indicate that you are moving more efficiently through the water!

CSS Sets
A majority of your key main sets will be based off of your own personal goal time. To figure out this goal time we do a CSS test in Week 1. I take take the results of this test and plug them into a calculator which will give us own training pace. Whenever you see “@ CSS Pace” or ” @ A Goal Time” written in a workout, that’s the target to hit. You will get used to this pace as your goal time!

Send Off Intervals (On The xx)
Send off intervals tell you the total amount of time between repeats in a set. This time includes the the amount of time needed to swim the prescribed distance plus whatever time is left is used for rest. The less time used to complete the swim, the more is left for rest before the beginning of the next repeat.

To Start Your Workout:

Push Start/Stop

To Start Your Rest:

Push LAP (NOT STOP!)

Tracking Your Rest:

If the set instructions are:
Rest XX seconds between repeats, then watch the “Rest Time” number
Go ON xx minutes/seconds, then watch the “Rpt On” number

To Start Your Next Repeat:

Push LAP

To Track Your Drills:

Scroll down to the “Drill Log”
Push “Lap” To Begin
Push “Lap” when you have finished the entire Drill Set
Push “Down” to get out of Drill Mode

● Add workouts@icanswimfast.com to your email contact list. This is THE inbox I check most regularly, only my paying clients have this address. Please make sure you email your workouts to this address.
● Once you have completed the workout, sync to Garmin Connect and follow the pictured instructions below and/or watch the instruction video above.
● Email the link of the file to workouts@icanswimfast.com
● Write the subject of the email as the workout you completed
EG – December W1 S1. You can see this under your name at the top of each page of the workouts PDF I send you each week.