One simple step to make your swim sessions more productive

If you’re trying to improve your swimming, it can be overwhelming to consider what you need to work on to reach your goals. 

From a skill perspective, you have to worry about your kick, your pull, your breathing, your body position, and more. 

From a training perspective, you have to worry about developing aerobic fitness, developing speed, preparing to race, and more. Sounds like a lot, and it is!

Unfortunately, the solution most triathletes is to work on everything all the time. They’ll do some aerobic work, they’re do some speed work, and they’ll do some skill work that addresses five different skills. 

It makes them feel like they’ve made progress in all the important areas, but they haven’t focused on anything, or done enough work in any one area to get better!

The reality is that most triathletes aren’t going to be spending multiple hours in the pool at a time, or even a single hour. And to make meaningful progress in any area takes some work. Ten to 15 minutes won’t cut it. 

As a result, it makes a lot more sense to focus on accomplishing one goal during a workout. Instead of trying to accomplish five objectives, just make sure you accomplish one.

At first, this can be pretty uncomfortable because it’s easy to focus on all of the work you’re not doing.  When that happens, just remind yourself that you can devote the next workout to something entirely different, and you’ll make a lot of progress when you do. 

Once you start to see improvement in the areas you focus on, you’ll start to understand the power of limiting your goals for any one workout.

Training goal

Rather than trying to work on each aspect of fitness during every workout, pick one. Stay focused on that objective and make sure the majority of the work in designed to improve that component of your fitness. 

The main work should be aligned with your goal and the warm-up should be aligned with your goal, which means it’s a lot more likely you’re going to accomplish it. 

If you’re swimming for longer periods of time, it’s okay to add in some complementary work. You could add a few short sprints to a longer aerobic workout. However, make sure the goal remains the goal!

Skill goal

The same concept applies to skills. Rather than performing five different drills skills, pick five drills that all focus on the same skill.  Or even better, pick the best drill for what you’re trying to accomplish and just use that. 

It takes practice to improve your skills, and if you’re never taking the time to get some significant practice on any one skill, it’s going to be difficult to improve.

Top image credit: Getty Images