Sunday, July 21, 2013

Swim Fun ~ User's choice

Most days our workout crew makes up our swim workouts on the spot as a collaboration of whoever is working out that day.  We end up with a lot of variety from day to day and it always keeps you guessing.

One of the signatures of our workouts are doing ladders.  It's an easy workout to fall back on and it is easy to keep the group together.  But every so often we end up with a day that includes a large number of repeats of the same distance.  In those instances, it's fun to make the repeats into a game of user's choice.  Usually you can make it divisible by the number of people that you have so that each person gets to select how to swim 1 or more of the intervals in your set.

Here's an example:  we had 3 of us doing the workout and needed to complete 12 x 50.  We split that up as 3 sets of 4 and each of was in charge for a set.  For my set, I went with drill/swim for each 50.  Swim the first 25 as drill and then the second 25 as swim in IM order.  One of the guys went with the option of pass the rabbit where the slowest in your group is the rabbit.  For that, the group swims the first 25 at the rabbit's pace and then sprints to pass the rabbit and finish.

While those are basic options you sometimes end up with a set full of goofiness.  Here are some ideas that one of the guys had us do for his set in the workout.
- Water Polo - swim head up, water polo style
- Sculling - several options you can do with this one.
- Somersaults - swim 7 strokes, execute a complete flip turn somersault and continue swim 7/flip, swim 7/flip down the length of the pool
- Corkscrews - swim alternating between freestyle and backstroke.

These are fun drills that you can incorporate into your workout to keep the fun in your fitness.

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