When does swimming more often make sense?

One of the challenges with improving in triathlon is that there are three disciplines to train for. With limited time and energy, it becomes a juggling act of managing competing demands.

And whether the swim is your current focus, or you just want to do enough to maintain your progress, a common question is, ‘how often should I swim?’.

While the simple answer is ‘more’, because the more you swim, the more likely it is you’ll improve, that’s not a practical answer. Everyone is limited in the time and energy they can commit to performing and recovering from training. This is especially true when trying to be successful in multiple disciplines.

And specific to swimming, there’s often a significantly larger time commitment associated with training. You usually have to transport yourself to a pool or body of water, you have to change, you have to train, etc. This is a bigger commitment than simply walking out the door for a run or a bike.

Because each swim can be a big investment in time and energy, it’s important to understand why you might want to

swim more often, and whether you should swim more often given your current goals and abilities.

Why increase the frequency?

The more you swim, the more likely it is that you will improve. In particular, the more often you swim, the more likely it is that you will improve. Swimming is a skill, and skills are best learned when they are practised more frequently.

If you’re going to swim for 2 hours per week, you’re going to learn at a faster rate swimming four times for 30mins compared with two times for 1hr. When it comes to learning any skill, frequency matters, and the same is true of swimming.

When swimming more often makes sense

The most important reason to swim more often is that you want to accelerate your swimming progress, particularly your skill development. When your focus is on improving your skills as quickly as you can, swimming more often is going to help you do that.

You don’t even have to swim more. You just want to find ways to get into the water more times per week. The more exposure you get to swimming, the faster you’ll improve.

A very simple strategy is to take 1-2 of the current sessions you’re performing and split them in half, performing the same amount of swimming across two days instead of one. This allows you to get more frequent practice without increasing the overall training load.

In contrast, if you’re happy with your current skill level, or you’re content with more consistent progress so you can focus on other areas of your training (or life!), swimming more often isn’t the answer. You can consolidate your workouts into less frequent, but perhaps longer sessions.