This week (4) commencing Monday 22nd January 2007:

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The following program is designed for swimmers capable of swimming 1000m in between 12 and 25 minutes and whom would typically cover ~2,000 to 3,500m in a given session. We will post a once weekly training session, which should be supplemented with your normal training program of between 2 and 5 swims per week (depending upon your ability and aspirations etc).

Sessions will feature drills from the Swim Smooth DVD Boxset, so if you haven't yet got yourself a copy, add one to your wish-list!

You will also find the generic Swim Smooth Short Hand Reference sheet to be a very useful guide for helping your way around some of the more 'technical' swim training terms.

OK, so let's get started!

Week 4 of 52:

Following last week's instructions on how to calculate your sub-threshold zone, this week's session is also going to be performed at sub-threshold level and to work out your 'zone' for that, take the value above (e.g. 1:22 per 100m) as your fastest pace and now multiply this value by 1.05 to give you your slowest pace, e.g. 1:26 per 100m in my case. So for today's sets of 50m I shall be swimming these on 41s to 43s, for the 100m on 1:22 to 1:26 and for the 200m I shall be aiming to swim between 2:44 and 2:52 per 200m. Here goes:

Warm-up:

400m nice and easy freestyle focusing on exhalation under the water and where possible breathing bilaterally to encourage a nice symmetrical stroke, balanced evenly to both sides. Split this 600m up as 100m normal freestyle, 200m as 4 x (15m sculling into 35m f/s), followed by another 100m easy freestyle.

12 x 50m at sub-threshold level - adding 10+ seconds to your slowest range time to give you your leaving time. This should feel relatively easy for such a short swim.

400m with fins alternating 50m drill into 50m freestyle - perform the drill 6/1/6 on your odd number drills and the drill 6/3/6 on the even number drills.

6 x 100m again at sub-threshold level, this time adding 15 seconds to your slowest range time. Concentrate on a long, smooth stroke working to maximize distance per stroke without feeling like you have turned into doing the catch-up drill (the longest possible stroke isn't always the most efficient!)

400m alternating 50m freestyle and 50m backstroke. These two strokes go well together as they allow you to focus primarily on body rotation, which is what I'd like you to think about here.

3 x 200m at sub-threshold level, working to emulate the set of 5 x 200m that you did last week.

Take a nice easy 200m cool-down of your choice!

Next week, a pure technique session for you!