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There is some benefit to making parts of your practice quite routine. We want to suggest that you do this with your Warm Up and Cool Down time in each practice. This would lower the amount of new things you need to track in each new practice, and it would allow you to more easily compare and evaluate your body signals at the start and at the finish of practice, from day-to-day.
You will notice that we rarely give a specific assignment for your Warm Up or Cool Down. Since each person will have different needs, we would like you to design this for yourself, following our guidelines.
Warm Up
First, please DO NOT SKIP your warm up time. It is so important to gently bring your performance systems online and coordinated before you increase the intensity of work you require of these systems.
It is recommended that you provide about 8 to 12 minutes of warm up time.
Start moving as gently as you can, letting your body indicate when it is eager to increase intensity. It takes some minutes for the tissues to loosen, the bio-chemistry, the motor, and the cardio-vascular systems to prepare for your main work. The better your tune-up, the more you can accomplish in your main sets.
You may do what we call a Silent Swim for the first 300 to 600 yards or meters. If you are comfortable to do so, we recommend that you swim continuously, but as gently as possible at first so that it is not difficult for the body.
A Silent Swim is where you swim in such a way to make the least amount of noise, splash, waves, or turbulence in the water around you. It gives an assignment to every part of your body to work together toward this single, sensory objective.
Then you may add next 200 with a variety of stroke styles (like breaststroke and backstroke) to work your joints in different movement patterns.
And you may do a short interval set where you change the tempo of your stroke.
An Example Warm Up
Silent Swim for 200
4x 50 of alternate stroke styles (no freestyle)
4 rounds of:
- 3x 25
- 10 seconds passive rest between each 25
- Repeat #1 at gentle stroke tempo
- Repeat #2 at moderate tempo
- Repeat #3 at brisk tempo
Cool Down
This is when you will review some focal point that you worked on today. Choose one focal point from today’s assignments and use that during this final swim.
Swim 200 to 300 (continuous or in pieces) in what I call ‘Pure Pleasure’ swimming mode. With a calm effort level, choose a tempo that is very comfortable, tune in to your focal point and swim with the goal of using that focal point to make the swim as pleasurable as you know how to.
You are certainly welcome to add other activities to your Warm Up and Cool Down time, if those are enjoyable and productive.
If you feel an unpleasant urge to add more to these we would challenge you to search for the justification of those activities – note whether they clearly contribute to the skills and enjoyment you are trying to build. If those activities don’t contribute clearly to your main goals, consider using your precious time in the pool for other activities that will.
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