My Weekly Swim Session Breakdown

One of the questions I get asked most often — by friends starting triathlon, by readers, by curious gym acquaintances — is some version of "but what do you actually do in the pool?" People imagine swim training is either aimless lap-counting or some mysterious elite ritual. It's neither. It's two structured sessions a week, each with a clear job to do. Here's exactly what my Tuesday and Thursday swims look like, why each one exists, and how the whole thing fits together.

Before the breakdown, one principle underpins everything: every session has a single purpose. I never just "go for a swim." One session each week is about technique and skill. The other is about effort and fitness. Keeping them separate is what stops me falling into the trap that quietly wrecks most amateur swimmers — grinding out the same medium-hard pace every single time, which builds neither real skill nor real fitness.

Tuesday: The Technique Session (about 45 minutes)

Tuesday is the day I slow everything down and pay attention. The goal isn't to get tired — it's to swim better. A typical session looks like this:

• 400m easy warm-up, no pressure, just waking up the stroke
• 4 × 50m catch drills (fingertip-drag drill), 20 seconds rest
• 4 × 100m at moderate effort, focusing entirely on body rotation
• 4 × 50m kick with a board
• 200m easy cool-down

That's roughly 1,800 metres. The drills are the heart of it. The fingertip-drag drill — trailing your fingertips along the surface during the recovery — forces a high elbow and a relaxed arm, which sets up a cleaner catch. The 100m rotation sets are where I rehearse breathing by rotating instead of lifting my head. On a technique day, if I finish feeling fresh rather than wrecked, I've done it right.

Thursday: The Endurance Session (about 60 minutes)

Thursday is where the lungs and legs earn their keep. This is the harder, fitness-building swim:

• 400m warm-up
• 4 × 200m at "comfortably hard" pace, 30 seconds rest
• 200m pull-buoy only (arms-only, to feel the pull)
• 4 × 50m fast, 90 seconds rest each
• 200m easy cool-down

That's around 2,200 metres. The 4 × 200m main set sits right at the edge of sustainable — hard enough that I'm counting down the lengths, easy enough that my form doesn't collapse. The short, fast 50s at the end teach my body what real speed feels like without the volume that would wreck my technique. The pull-buoy block in the middle is both a breather and a reminder that propulsion lives in the arms.

"One session to swim beautifully. One session to swim hard. Never both at once, and never neither."

Why Two Swim Sessions a Week Is Enough (For Now)

I'm an amateur triathlete with a full life, not a professional swimmer. Two focused sessions a week, done consistently for months, have taken me much further than three or four scattered, unfocused ones ever did. At this level, consistency beats volume every time. If you can only manage two swims a week, make one technical and one hard, and you'll progress faster than most people swimming more often with no plan at all.

The Warm-Up and Rest Intervals I Used to Skip

Two details I ignored for far too long made a bigger difference than any clever main set. The first is the warm-up. For months I skipped straight to the hard part to "save time," then wondered why my first few hundred metres always felt awful. A proper 400m warm-up wakes up your stroke, raises your heart rate gradually, and means the main set starts when your body is actually ready — not three lengths in. The second is rest intervals. The 20 or 30 seconds between reps aren't wasted time; they're what lets you hold good technique and real pace across the whole set. Cut the rest too short and you're just swimming tired, reinforcing the very habits you came to fix. Honour the clock, and every rep counts.

What I Track — and What Actually Matters

I wear a Garmin Forerunner and it logs three numbers I care about: pace per 100m, heart rate, and SWOLF. Pace and heart rate are obvious. SWOLF is the one that changed how I think about swimming. It adds your stroke count and your time for a length into a single efficiency score — the lower, the better. You can lower it by taking fewer strokes or by swimming faster, but the real magic is when your SWOLF drops while your pace stays the same. That means you're getting more distance out of every stroke. Of every metric I track, SWOLF has been the clearest, most honest sign that my technique is genuinely improving, rather than my fitness simply papering over bad habits.