Active rest

I've been ponderin' lately, and I wonder how many of my swimming friends have had the same thought.

OW vs. pool swimming, well, where do you start.  For one thing, in a pool you get to rest your arms for a split second (full second?) at the end of each length.  That adds up.  And how about the kick off the wall?  If you streamline well, you can really rest your arms more and gain distance with little effort and, oh yeah, rest!  In OW swimming, your arms never stop.  Or shouldn't.  Your feet never stop.  Or shouldn't. 

So how do we replicate this in the pool, for those of us without the benefit of wonderful year-round weather.  I've thought recently of active rest, and how to incorporate that.  On Thursday I did a main set that consisted of  4 x (2 x 150 on 2:50 followed by 1 x 200 on 4:20).  The 150s were meant to be pushed; swimming at an effort level of 8 on a scale of 10.  I came in around 2:07 for each.  The 200s were restful, effort level 3 or 4, and I did those on about 3:30-3:40. 

At the end of each odd 150, as I was hanging off the wall in the deep end (recall that my stupid pool requires 3 laps for 100 yards...do the math), I thought that I could probably get better rest doing elementary backstroke back to the shallow end.  For that matter, why not elementary back for all rests?

There are problems in this, of course.  If your rest is such a short time that you can't even swim a length, then you might as well wait at the wall.  But if you're doing sprint sets with long rest periods, why not keep swimming.

I've found that my breathing is all over the place at the end of a sprint; I stand in the shallow end huffing away like an asthmatic.  But once the rest is over and I have a slower set to do, my breathing gets more organized.  I get into a rhythm and come down in HR must faster. In short, I rest better while swimming that slow set than when I rest at the wall.

So, I think I might integrate elementary back in some rests.  In the workout I mentioned above, I think I can fit in a slow elementary back lap between each 250, and then one again after the 200.  I'll try it next week and report back.  Meanwhile, any of my readers out there have experience in this sort of thing?

Comments

[Rob D.]

one of the guys I work out with does vertical dolphin kick between swims on days he's feeling motivated and doesn't want to stop moving... only works if your pool is deep enough though

[IronMike]

I've done that before and like it. But I don't think it has done anything for my kick.