What is the training regimen of Olympic swimmers?

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What is the training regimen of Olympic swimmers? image

What does an Olympic swimmer's training regimen look like?

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Answer by Carly Geehrformer USA Swimming National Team Member

The short, unsatisfying answer is that it varies wildly — depending on someone's age/gender/events. 

A post-grad male sprinter, for example, won't train nearly as many hours as a distance swimmer, and the type of training they'll do will be strength and power based, focusing a lot on out-of-the-water training. Jason Lezak, for example, has his training totally dialed in. He doesn't put in a ton of yards in the pool, but his focus is on quality — speed work in the pool and power outside of it.

To elaborate a little bit, an Olympic swimmer's training regimen generally doesn't look too different from that of a non-Olympic-but-still-elite-level swimmer. That's because (with a few notable exceptions) swimmers train with teams, and it's difficult/impractical to do totally individualized training in the pool. Certain teams have different strengths and training styles. Some are much more focused on race pace speed work, which means you can't do as much volume, and some are on the other end of the spectrum where they pound the yards mercilessly and typically have days upwards of 20k. Yes, that's a lot of time staring at that black line.

But, I imagine whoever asked this probably wants to hear details about the blood/sweat/tears (pee?) of elite training. I can't say this is "typical" for reasons already mentioned but I can tell you about the training leading up to when a bunch of my teammates/training partners (including Jason Lezak, Aaron Peirsol, and Mike Cavic) made the Olympics:

We did 9 sessions / week — which is actually on the lower end of how many sessions teams will do — consisting of doubles M/T/Th/F, a single workout on Saturday morning, and W/Sun as rest days. Morning practices were pool only, and in the afternoons we'd do an hour or so of "dryland" (medicine balls, core work, running, stretch cords, various other forms of land-torture) before getting into the pool. We were never in the pool longer than 2-2.5 hours. (Trust me, it's plenty.) I'm sure the older guys were supplementing with weightlifting, but it wasn't something that everyone did or needed to do.

Our team was very focused on race pace "quality" yardage, so our volume per session ranged from 4-7k, even for someone like me who was more of a distance swimmer. That said, each training session saw the whole group split up into sub-specialties (e.g. breaststrokers, distance, sprint, IM, etc...) so even though we might have been doing roughly the same yardage, we'd all be doing very different things, focusing on our specialties.

Bottom line — it's a lot of swimming.

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