Guidance for Practice Structure

It is typical in conventional swimming to have totally different practices every day to prevent boredom. But making new decisions every day takes more energy, and having different practice patterns every day makes it difficult to carefully measure small improvements in quantities and qualities from practice to practice. We recommend that you keep a fairly consistent practice structure, and keep some parts of the practice (like Warm Up and Cool Down) routine. We also encourage you to repeat some of the exact same practice sets over a series of practices so that your body has time to adapt to the challenge and you can more easily notice (and be encouraged by) those small improvements. These practices present very specific puzzles for you to solve that are just within reach of your abilities… if you concentrate. And by concentrating on the puzzle, time disappears and practices become intriguing.

Typical Practice Structure

Our kind of practices may follow this pattern:

• Warm-Up (what we like to call “Tune-Up” in TI), 8 to 12 minutes long
• Main Set 1 (choose a skill assignment), 5 to 15 minutes long
• Main Set 2 (optional). 5 to 15 minutes long
• Main Set 3 (optional), 5 to 15 minutes long
• Cool-Down, 5 to 8 minutes long

To keep things simple and focused on what is necessary, we recommend a simple, routine for the Tune-Up and the Cool-Down. You may change this if you like.

Depending on your time and energy available, you may choose 1, 2, or 3 or more Main Sets for your practice.

For each Main Set you will be assigned one skill project or you may choose one if not given. If you are designing your own practice, we recommend that you change your skill focus every 15 minutes. Having more than one skill project for practice is good.

A Level 1 practice can be anywhere between 30 and 60 minutes from start to finish. It is better to have a short practice with high quality and practice more frequently in the week, than to do long practices, with less quality, less frequently.