Do You Train Too Hard?

One of the most important components of a training program is slow aerobic work. One of the mistakes that I have made before and I see a lot of athletes commonly making this mistake; is that they do their slow aerobic work at a pace which is a little too quick to work the right training zone. For example, if you are doing 5-6 sessions a week, 1 or 2 of those sessions should be slow aerobic pace work where you are keeping your heart rate fairly low and sustaining it for 30, 60, 90 minutes – for a sustained period of time.

0:09 – Slow Aerobic Training
0:19 – Are You Training Too Hard?
0:36 – Resist The Urge
0:52 – How to Build Your Aerobic Base
1:02 – Recovering from Hard Training Sessions
1:23 – Get Personal Recommendations at Effortless Swimming’s Membership Program

There is always the urge to push that little bit harder if you are competitive and like to train hard it is so easy to slip into that habit of training your slow aerobic pace work at a pace which is too fast. Take a step back, take a look at what the purpose of the slow aerobic training is; it is to build up your aerobic base so you can draw on that fitness for your races and other training sessions. It allows you to recover from your higher intensity training sessions. You might have done a high intensity threshold session the night before and the next day a good way to recover from that and still get the most out of a training session the next day is to do a slow aerobic session where you are keeping your heart rate low for a sustained period of time.

In Effortless Swimming’s Membership Program, one of the things that we look at is your training program and all the different elements that bring it together. You will need some slow aerobic swimming, you will need some high intensity work and you will need some speed. There are a lot of different things that bring it together so we can take a look at what you’re doing and make suggestions as to what you might be missing so that you can get the most out of your training program and be as fit as you can be for the race that your training for.

Members can login here. That’s it for swimming news this week, see you next week.