Comparing running effort to swimming

swimming will keep your cardiovascular fitness at a great level, if anything it may improve it

whereas swimming 3k without stopping seems impressive, its best to put your workouts into sets (ie. 4 sets of 200's) and vary the rest time in between, you can even probably come up with your own hard-ish swim workouts by using track intervals as a guideline, you will find that you can swim hard again and again without too much rest because of the lack of impact. I would also suggest varying your strokes (back, breast, etc) if your injury allows, because that will aid a lot. I wouldn't focus too much on distance in the pool (in the beggining anyway), its best to just set time limits and see if your workout completes within it (I would get up to swimming for an hour at least)

Thanks for the advice - I was doing the long-ish swims nonstop to try to imitate a regular training run. I have tried drills before such as the 200's you mentioned and suppose that would give me a better workout, or at least more like a speed workout.

I will try some breaststroke and backstroke as well, although I am not nearly as good at those. They are more awkward for me, and I don't think I am getting my HR up as high as I struggle to maintain form (particularly with backstroke).

I'm in the same boat as you, I have a stress fracture in my second metatarsal for about 5 months now and swim about 20k yards a week, I do have experience with swimming and it seems 3k meters every day may do more harm then good if this is an injury that may take a long time to heal, and you are a beginner swimmer. If you are confident that you can handle 3k m a day, then i would break it up as the previous post stated...Do some back stroke, breast stroke, maybe even kick board if it doesn't aggravate the hamstring. Too many meters of freestyle can/will result in rotator cuff problems. I would recommend a 1 hour swim straight each week, with 2 interval workouts ex)20x 100 meters on a 2 minute cycle..or some type of ladder 500,400,300,200,100, etc..based on your fitness and speed. The other days maybe limit yourself to 2k meters of easy swimming, or 30 minutes..The way i look at it, is 1 mile of swimming =4 miles of running...I learned this in My exercise physiology class in Cortland, but this energy expenditure might vary on how efficient you are in the pool. Good luck and get better.

A general rule is that a 100 swimming = about 400 on the track timewise. For most runners, the 100 swimming will take you longer.

To stay in shape swimming, because you don't get your HR up as high, you have to go hard.

Do sets like this:

10x50 on an interval (allow around 10 secs recovery)

5x100 on an interval that allows 15 secs for recovery.

try to learn the other strokes:fly, back, breast - they will work you big time, break up the boredom, and prevent shoulder injuries from working just the freestyle muscles.

get some fins and do some hard 50s and 100s with these - they help get your HR up and will help your kick. runners generally suck at kicking because of a lack of ankle flexibility.

see if there are some masters swim workouts at your pool and do the workouts with them. you'll get a coach to help your stroke and people around you to push you.

treat it as a sport just like you do running and it' ll help you mentally get through not being able to run.

oh, and for the hamstring - get in the gym and work the crap out of it.

Thanks a lot everyone, for the advice - much appreciated.

Swimming is also good for light stretching in the pool for the hamstring as it gradually gets better. You can go through a range of motion at about shoulder depth, but gently until the hamstring gets better.

Also-- you can try doing fartlek-type things in the pool to keep your HR up.

For example, do a set of 4-5 X 200 where you go all out for a 50, do a 25 underwater, or even just swim the length of the pool without breathing.

happyfeet wrote:

To stay in shape swimming, because you don't get your HR up as high, you have to go hard.

Just to expand on this concept a little bit further. The reason your HR will not get up as high as running is that in swimming, you are in a prone position and your brain is parallel to your heart. Therefore your heart doesn't have to work as hard to keep blood flowing to the brain. Other factors include floating versus standing, impact versus non impact, etc.

So as others have said, don't be afraid of swimming intervals everyday. You will see a marked improvement in your conditioning versus swimming 3k straight.

The other thing I would recommend to help get your heart rate up is vertical kicking. Because this is kicking as opposed to aqua jogging it shouldn't affect your hamstring much but will definitely get your heart rate up (for the same reason noted above). Try to vertical kick for a minute with a minute recovery several times before your swim and it will accelerate your conditioning.

One final thing, try to practice with masters swim team. You'll be able to maintain a good competitive mindset racing everyone in practice, learn a new skill correctly and have a helluva lot more fun when you are on a "team".

Also, it will be one of the few times in life where you get to hang out with everyone in a Speedo and no one will care except for maybe those scrawny runners over in lane 8 aqua jogging their way into oblivion.