In early February Swim Ireland ran a Munster Masters Freestyle Clinic. Breda Mcnamara, Mairead Coughlan & Andrea Newport attended the clinic which took place in UL. The clinic comprised of a morning of classroom sessions with the afternoon focus on the pool. The clinic looked at Core & Posture for Masters Swimmers. The quality of the 2 presenters was excellent, Catherine Hanratty from Lurgan & Jesus Perez NAC.   Catherine’s focus was mainly on posture in everyday life at home at work etc.. We had a great presentation of everyday bad habits and then did a practical session on some [&hellip

In our third article we now move on to Endurance 3, i.e. Aerobic Capacity. Swims are hard with rest from 1 minute, with distance from 400m up. A good test set would be 6*400M max effort with a minute rest or more after each set. Sets such as this are helpful to long distance swimmers to improve their endurance over a long period. It can also break the monotony of continuous swimming and is very beneficial to swimmers who like to swim 200m fly. Heart rate should be 80% plus. The greatest challenge which is unique to swimmers is that [&hellip

Following our first article on training systems we are now moving on to Endurance 2. Over 70% of training for all swimmers is done in this system. Again depending on the time you can swim any distance from 1000 to 3000 meters sets of 100/200/400/800 may be used plus other combinations. Intensity is around 75% to 80 % of max effort, rest should be short but no shorter than 8 seconds and no longer than 30 seconds, on your 100s and 200s and adjust accordingly on the longer distances. Swims should be hard but bearable. Sets should last at least [&hellip

We are introducing an item called Coaches Corner and hope that you will find it to your benefit. The topic  is about training specifics. We train to a system to suit our needs and sport. Explanations will be as user friendly as possible. In modern swimming set-up we use 6 different types, primarily to cover all distances and types of individual. They are Endurance 1 Endurance 2 Endurance 3 Sprint 1 Sprint 2 Sprint 3 Obviously all this is relative to the amount of time you can spend in training.  The above is all about the intensity of the swim i.e. [&hellip