"Just Swim" or "Drill, Drill, Drill"?

i just swim, but during my swim i try different things with my stroke entrance/kick/breathing/arm lever.  at the beginning of april i did my first swim and was barely able to complete 100 meters without stopping.  as of now i am swimming well over a mile with ease.

now i just need to work on my sighting 

I never understand why this is so black and white..

warm up

do some drills

do a main set

cool down

I do 25-50% of my workout as drills/pull sets

I do both.  I started out where I would swim and my hips would drop due to my picking my head up because of breathing issues.   So I worked on breathing drills.  Once I got the breathing down to one side breathing, I worked on my stroke.   Then found my breathing to one side was an issue for me, so I worked on bilateral breathing which led me to streamlining to help me work on my form some more and more breath control drills.  

Once I had streamlining down and my hips were no longer dropping, I worked on my flipturns so that I could continue with breathing control and working on my form.  Now I am working on my pull to reduce my energy expenditure as well as the high elbow technique.  I have gotten to where my hips no longer sink, and I can swim the distances, but now would like to work on my technique to be more proficient.  

I pretty much just swim.  I live in an area where I have difficulty finding the pool open for the most part, so I am lucky to even get to do that.  The next closest pool is about an hour and 15 mins away, and it is primarily a retirement area where people do group classes.  I would have to drive an hour and a half to get to a pool with any coaches or masters classes available.  I would have to be there at 5a.m. and I have 2 children that have to be ready and go to school daily, so yeah, I just get happy when the pool is available to me and I get in and just do the best I can.

jami 

Yes.

Whatever Suzanne (AdventureBear) said, and this is what I've got to say ...

If you have specific goals in training, then every session should have a point. The question is, what's the point and exactly how will doing this achieve that point towards my goal?

So it depends on where you're at in swimming, where you want to be, and how that fits into triathlon overall.

I will say all-drills as an extreme is a lousy way to go when there are other ways to focus and shape whole swimming that actually constitute what you will be doing swimming. If you plan to do your whole swim leg of a tri doing a drill ... well, then go nuts, I guess.

Drills are ONE means to an end. They are not the end.

For example, in his IM training plans, Don Fink includes 800m of drills in EVERY SINGLE SWIM SESSION. I think that's asinine. I don't know anyone who's actually followed that (sure there may be some). Everyone I know has done masters squads or other well-structured SWIM (not drill) workouts, even though they may do some drills. But not a huge chunk of every session.

The short answer is, neither.

If you've got technique problems, it is very, very unlikely that they'll improve randomly with just more swimming. Because, for 99% of adult swimmers, they don't.

Equally, random drills won't improve your swim technique. What WILL improve your technique is getting exact feedback on what YOU are doing wrong. And then getting instruction on HOW exactly to do it right. Of course, finding a person who is qualified to give you such feedback and instruction can be challenging, as unfortunately many swim coaches are not able to do this.

^^^^This. x2.

Both. 

Nothing to debate here.  Look at any collegiate or Olympic swim team workout - both drills & big volume.

Swimming is too technical not to include drills.  Not if you want to improve.

Mark

It's best to focus on technique all the time.  This is true whether you're doing a drill, or trying to hit the send off time on your 20th 100 in a hard set.  During a drill, the focus is all technique, because the purpose is to develop unconscious competence (something that's done well without consciously thinking about it) in one part of a stroke by isolating it from the rest of the stroke, allowing 100% focus on that part.  During a hard set, attention needs to be split between effort and technique.

My instructions to someone when I've assigned a hard set is to focus more on technique while maintaining a high effort level whenever they start to get tired and are struggling.  If they let their form fall apart every time they fatigue, all that's going to happen is development of bad habits.  If they can maintain their form while putting out a hard effort, then they will get results.

http://joelfilliol.blogspot.ca/2012/01/most-popular-post-on-this-blog-is-is.html

1. Conditioning trumps drills. Technique matters, but the way most athletes try to improve technique doesn't work. Get fitter, and your ability to hold good technique improves. It takes a lot of work to develop aerobic conditioning in your upper body. If you think you are already swimming a lot but are not improving, swim more and keep at it. There are no shortcuts.

 Ahh i love this debate....   i do what the previous poster says (warm up, do some drills, do a main set, cool down).    I do believe that hard work has improved me more than anything.

a lot of triathletes think 2-3 times a week should be sufficient to get good in the pool (usually 45 minutes at a time).  Sure, if you have serious flaws in your stroke and can barely make it across the pool, learning how to swim should be your first priority.  After that, there's no shortcuts to going from BOP to FOP other than putting in thousands of yards.  

Here's the catch though, a lot of people make the mistake of swimming too long of intervals, and their form breaks down way too much for them to be effectively improving the right muscles.  So essentially, yes they are just putting in junk miles swimming at a turtle's pace without really getting the gains.  Swimming is a non-impact sport and the body reacts very well to very short but hard sets with good form (50s/100s).  Unlike running, if you can hammer out sets of 100s going very hard with rest intervals, you will actually find it easier to swim for longer periods of time at a good pace.  Sure, throwing in a 1000 to see where you're at every now and then is fine, but I see waaaay too many people at the pool swimming slowly and steadily doing junk yards which is not what I advocate when i tell people they need to put in the time to get faster.

If you wanted to run a very fast 10k/half/or marathon, no way would 2-3 runs a week 45 minutes at a time get you to FOP.  The same goes for swimming.