For the past few months, SwimSwam has been posting a daily swimming workout to help inspire swim coaches around the world who are looking for new ideas to try with their swimmers. Since most of the world’s pools are currently closed for business, we wanted to give swimmers and coaches an alternative set of dryland workouts to use to stay fit during the quarantine. These workouts will be designed to be done around the house. Some will use basic equipment, like medicine balls or stretch cords, while others will be all body-weight exercises.
These workouts are provided for informational purposes only.
See more at-home training ideas on our At Home Swim Training page here
TEST SET ROUND 4
It’s time for our 4th round of test sets. This is a general workout that we’ve been running about every 2 weeks to see where you’re improving, if you’re getting stronger, or if you need to shift focus.
Heading into Friday’s recovery day, this should be a total burnout workout – give it your max, knowing that Friday will be a lighter recovery workout.
If you’ve been tracking your test sets, please leave the results in the comments below! We’d love to hear if the workouts are working, or if we need to adjust the intensity or nature of them.
WARMUP
Shoulder activation warmup from GuerillaZen Fitness:
TEST SET
Like any test set, the key here is good record-keeping. Grab a piece of paper, or open a notepad on your phone, to mark down your performance after each item below.
Rest 60 seconds between each workout
- Pushup Max
- Standard plank max
- Pushup Max
- Flutter kick Max (for time)
- Pushup Max
- Standard plank max
- Pushup Max
- Run around a set course (look for about a 1 mile course, but whatever you can do safely where you live is fine).
Note: if your hips drop on a plank, that ends your time – keep your back flat!
Got that all down? Good! This whole set should take about 15 minutes, so below is a secondary post-test set to make sure you still get some good work in. This will focus on lower body, since the test set above is mostly an upper body and core test set.
SECONDARY SET
:20 rest in between each
- 15 x calf raises (most should be able to hold some weight while doing this)
- 10 x body weight squats (use good form)
- 15 x calf raises
- 10 x squat jumps (use good form)
- 15 x calf raises
- 30 x burpees
COOL DOWN
With a nice walk, or a stretching routine.
Do we need to follow these workouts consistently or can we choose the ones that we like the most and do those? Are these meant to be done in order or can we jump around? Thanks
Question – they are generally designed to go in order, incorporating weekly rest days, and things like ‘test sets’ to check progress. We recognize that some people won’t have access to all of the equipment all of the time, like a jump rope, and might need to skip those.
You can jump around too, just work with your coaches and/or trainers to make sure you have a plan. For example, you wouldn’t want to just do straight pushup workouts 3-4 days in a row.
Thanks. Also, how many push-ups should an 11 year old girl who swims competitively be able to do?
I know you’re going to hate this answer, but there is no good answer. Especially at that age, everyone is at such a different level of development, it will vary widely from person to person.
I would approach it the same way I would a pool workout – there’s no time an 11-year old girl should be able to do in the 50 free, they should just be focused on improving their time. That’s sort of the goal of these test sets, to standardize a measure for improvement.
If you’re looking for targets or goals, the presidential fitness testing standards could be a good place to start:
http://www.newton.k12.in.us/hs/pe/images/physical-fitness-guide.pdf
They have the standard for a… Read more »
Thank you very much. 🙏