Masters swim not working!

I'll add that I don't feel like I improve at the masters swims I go to.

It's mainly because the various masters groups I go to here spend either too much time doing strokes other than freestyle, or spend too much time resting between sets and as a result emphasizing sprint swim speed, which at least for me, doesn't translate as well to oly/HIM triathon swims compared to the longer sets. The last swim masters workout I went to, we spent 15 minutes working kicking with fins & board, another 30 minutes working on breaststroke drills, and another 20 minutes on backstroke drills, leaving 15 minutes for freestyle. Not so good for triathletes, even if you do gain a little from the other strokes. (ROI is terrible, though - you absolutely will NOT get better at freestyle if you're REPLACING freestyle time with other strokes.)

I will say that for pure short-distance hammerage, masters is great , as at least for my mediocre swim speed, there are plenty of people for me to chase (and lose against). But I haven't yet been in a masters group where I could get a decent set of 300-500 yd interval sets - it's either too fast or too slow.

I'll also freely admit that if you're one of the lucky ones to find a masters group that fits well with your workouts and ability, there's no doubt that swimming with others will push your improvement faster than doing it solo. It's the finding that perfect group/workout mix that's the hard part.

It is not always about speed with swimming. It is also about refining your stroke so you become more efficient and use less energy. The speed comes eventually.

If your stroke reverts back to old habbits when you try to swim hard, you probably need to do 2 things.

1. Slow down. Not in a literal sense, but ease back on the effort so that you can practice better form. Swimming fast is not about churning your arms over as quickly as you can and kicking as furiously as possible. It's a balance of effort and technique. Many beginners actually swim faster with less effort.

2. Swim more. As in increase your actual swim fitness. Learning good form doesn't mean much if you don't have the fitness to sustain that form for a given amount of time.

My experience has been the same as some other posters here. Too much resting and bullshitting, too much time spent on stokes other than freestyle (which is what I really need to work on) and rarely ever nonstops greater than 300m. My group also loves to use fins, which is fine for building muscle and stengthing the kick I suppose but my basic stroke sucks so the fins turn into a crutch more than anything for me. I actually break away at certain points and throw in a 400m freestyle on my own once or twice during the 2 hr session.

Unless you are training very intensely, a month isn't much to make gains like 10seconds/ 100m based purely on fitness. If your lanemate had such dramatic gains, it's likely due less to fitness than possibly correcting some serious flaw that was really holding back his stroke.It reminds me of a teammate who was probably 20-25 seconds/100m slower than me without fins, but every time we had a fin set she would be right on my heels. Clearly those fins were correcting some disastrous flaw with her stroke! Maybe you don't have such flaws and just need to gain fitness, or maybe you do, and haven't fixed them yet. Another possibility is you simply had an off day, and/or that your teammate sandbagged the first time trial, or was having a bad day then.

I don't know about others, but my swim performance seems to vary more than my run or bike performance, as does my feeling in the water. I've been swimming since infancy, swam competitively for six years as a kid and teen, and according to my coaches have a pretty efficient stroke, but it's normal for my times for a set of 100's to vary by 5-10 seconds from workout to workout. Some days I feel really fast and will power through speedwork but struggle with distance sets; other times only the long stuff feels right and I feel like I'm just thrashing around on sprints. It seems related to fatigue level from work and other workouts, sometimes nutrition, time of month (female) or other random things. I actually just discussed this with our head coach and she says it's true for many swimmers, maybe related to fatigue affecting how efficient you are in the water on a given day.

Edited by Hot Runner 2013-11-21 6:53 AM

Thanks for your replies.

This is more of a complaint about my own lack of progress then this particular Masters program. Though they do do a bunch of things that don't seem to have a lot of bearing on freestyle speed (kicks? one-arm drills?) most of it seems very helpful. I get a lot of feedback from the coaches and it all seems very helpful - it just hasn't yet improved speed. The program seems excellent.

There is a guy there who came in because he wanted to improve his triathlon swim, and he told me that when he first started his time-trial 100yd measure was 1:43, and now he is down to 1:15. Then he told me that he had gotten so involved with swimming that he hadn't done a triathlon since he started the Masters program.

Uh, it's yards, sadly. And it isn't 1:30s/100 - it is more of 1:30 per a single hundred, followed by recovery.

Best I have done in a pool triathlon is 7 minutes for 400 yards. And that is OK, but I'm still working on improvement.

Go to You Tube and look for ""Tower26 Jerry Rodriques". He give a talk on swim training for Triathletes.It was very informative and has changed my thinking on swim training. My take away from his talk is " volume,volume volume and than swim some more!! Keep a taut body profile, breath every stroke, work on your catch, but that will improve as your conditioning improves. Forget other strokes, concentrate on your freestyle, keep drills to a minimum using pull buoys, ankle bands and snorkel.

A lot of what he said I agree with and have changed my mindset as well...but I don't agree with everything. Some I have seen in practice while others I don't think fits for every athlete. Good summation of what he said by yourself. But going to the volume thing, yes you need to some more, but I think he should have emphasized frequency over volume. If triathletes are used to 2-3k sessions, then doing 4-5k sessions won't help. The fatigue that will build up will effect the stroke in negative ways and then the end of each swim will only reinforce bad technique and that is how you are ending your swim. So to increase volume it would be best to be frequent with the same, or even slightly less distance each swim. Just my opinion.

Increasing frequency at same volume is certainly better then increasing volume at same frequency. I do notice at the end of the hour-long Masters swim sessions, particularly if they have been distance oriented, that my form is a little more sloppy.

Still, one has only so much time. This Masters group meets 4x a week - I usually go twice, and swim once a week on my own.

Edited by north_north_west 2013-11-21 3:19 PM

I agree totally, it's not increased meters per session but more sessions per week. I try to swim at least three sessions per week with a 15 minute warm up, drills, and than around 60 minutes of good hard swimming per session. By Friday I'm toast and my body really needs the weekend to recover.

PS: The OP indicated that they were frustrated that they had not improved in a months time frame. Jerry helped me adjust my expectations and timeline. I realized that it'll take a few years before I really became a "fairly good" swimmer. I equate it to my running journey. It took my about 18 months slogging along at a snails pace before it all finally clicked. My body and aerobic conditioning finally got to the point where I really began to enjoy running!