LAPS, DRILLS, OR INTERVALS?

How to choose the right mix for your training goals

By Terry Laughlin

A few years ago I spent a week in the Colorado Rockies conducting a Total Immersion Adult Swim Camp. I taught stroke drills to 24 adult swimmers of widely varying ability each morning. Each afternoon we all went skiing. One of my star pupils was a 50-year- old Kansan named Leo Rutten. Leo is a triathlete and veteran marathon runner, with the stamina to swim for two-and-a-half hours, run 13 miles, and cross-country ski for nearly three hours one day (at a 9000' altitude!) while we were in Winter Park. Yet, for all his fitness, Leo really struggled when it came to swimming.

A year ago, he began paying a college swim coach to plan his workouts. In a year of professionally planned "postal" workouts (Leo's coach was hundreds of miles away), he improved his mile swim from 45 to 43 minutes. Those meager returns convinced Leo that his stroke, not his workouts, needed attention.

For seven days at camp, Leo did no "workouts." Instead, he spent hours learning and perfecting drills designed to teach him an efficient stroke. After returning home, at my recommendation, Leo did not return to "working out." He spent the same amount of time in the pool each week as before, but devoted 75 percent of it to practicing the drills and trying to lower his stroke count. Within weeks he called me excitedly to report that he'd dropped his mile time from 43 to 36 minutes and his 25-yard stroke count from 27 to 22.
At his next triathlon, Leo will probably swim a lot faster (and probably a lot easier, too) than he ever has before--all because he was willing to drop all "hard" and "fast" swim training from his program. Depending on your skill level and your reasons for taking your workout in a pool, that workout style might suit you better than any other. Choosing the right style is fairly easy. There are three basic workout styles to choose from:

Lap or marathon swimming. Your goal is to swim for a certain distance or time. You swim it nonstop, or rest when you feel like it. Your pace varies from slow to moderate.

Organized skill training (drills). Most of your lengths are skill drills, stroke-counting, or some combination of the two. The pace clock is less important than your stroke count. Most of your yardage is done in repeats that are short enough, and with rest intervals long enough that you can hold good form and efficient stroke counts.

Intensive interval training. You battle the pace clock and your own fatigue to build endurance and speed. You do mostly short- to medium-length interval repeats at paces from moderate to fast. Most of your workout is focused on making certain intervals or holding certain paces on your repeats.

If your main training goal is relaxation and fitness and you have little interest in improving or demonstrating your speed in some form of competition, then you can achieve your goal very nicely with style #1, perhaps with a bit of #3 mixed in for variety.

If you are more interested in improving your performance, then some combination of #s 2 and 3 are your choice. Many triathletes start with #1 and go straight to #3 when they learn that swim coaches favor intervals over marathon swimming. But, as Leo learned, #3- type workouts are a waste of time in you haven't developed basic skills. If you have an inefficient stroke, hard workouts merely reinforce your mistakes.

If you've never swum competitively, you probably need to do an awful lot of #2 with just a bit of #s 1 and 3 thrown in for variety. If you swam competitively as a kid or have been doing it for several years as a Master, and still have a pretty good stroke, you'll focus on #3, but can still benefit from doing up to 40% or 50% of your workouts in #2. Even elite swimmers focus on skill and efficiency for up to a third of their training. But the better swimmer you are, the harder you need to train to achieve your goals. The best swimmers, generally, have become so efficient that they can swim fairly far and fast with relatively little effort. So they need to train hard to get results. And hard training is easier to do in the pool than almost anywhere else, because it inflicts so little stress on the body.