Our Newsletter this week was talking about Monitoring your swim with CSS based training. The first step to this is a CSS Benchmark to record your swim metrics, which can then be taken forward to help you in your training and monitoring.
The I-Swam set below is a great standard test involving some light technique work and a 400m and 200m time trial. The main elements of this set and the test itself are the time trials, swim well and make sure you record with accuracy on both time and counting your lengths.
For those that want me to look at their times please feel free to mail me your results.
I-Swam CSS Benchmarking Set
Warm Up
200-300m – Easy Swimming focusing on your breathing technique and rotation
100m – 6-3-6 Out > < Moderate paced FC back (Fins on)
100m – Broken Arrown out > < Easy FC back
Build
3 x 100m Building Pace through the set
2 x 50m Easy out > < fast back
Time Trial 1
400m Time Trial – Ensure you record the total time and ideally the first 100m split of this swim. You don’t want to be re-swimming the set because of a simple error.
Active Recovery
5-10 minutes of easy swimming and drills, nothing fast. I recommend swims using pull boys, paddles and a centre snorkel.
Time Trial 2
200m Time Trial – Again, ensure you record the total time, no splits are needed this time. You don’t want to be re-swimming the set because of a simple error.
Cooldown
5-10 minutes of easy own choice swimming, just bringing the heart rate down.
You can calculate your CSS pace at http://www.swimsmooth.com/training.html, or via the www.swimsmooth.guru if you are a subscriber.
If you would like an accurate picture including drop off rates etc please feel free to mail me your figures at Jason@Southwestswim.co.uk
Happy Swimming
