What Difference Can a Single Swim Session Make?

Try one of 6 new sessions by our 6 new Swim Smooth Coaches in 🇮🇪🇺🇸🇬🇧🇱🇹🇺🇸🇧🇪!

Paul Newsome, Swim Smooth

Aug 30, 2024

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Swim Smooth Coaches - how to join Swim Smooth — Welcome to the team - Candice 🇮🇪, Cyndy 🇺🇸, Ed 🇬🇧, Jurgis 🇮🇪, Lorna 🇺🇸 & Marieke 🇧🇪 - for coaching news/applications for Class of ‘25 click here.

Hey swimmers,

How’s your week been? Managed to get a swim or three in? I hope so!

I think we can all appreciate the benefits of a swim on our mental health and the opportunity a few laps in the pool or splash in the ocean can have on our mood. It’s often transformative, no matter what’s going on in our lives.

To that end, and before we dig into this week’s blog discussing the benefits of a single swim session on our physical fitness to help answer the question…

“How many sessions per week do I need to do to make an improvement?”

…I'm thrilled to announce the addition of six brand new Certified Swim Smooth Coaches to our global community! Each new coach has been rigorously assessed, mentored directly by two or more of our existing Certified Coaches, and armed with our brand new, exclusive, 300+ page Coaching Manual:

How to become a Swim Smooth Coach — The all new Swim Smooth Coaching Manual, available exclusively to our trainee coaches

This marks a significant step in our ongoing mission to enhance your access to top-notch, enjoyable swim coaching for adults in supportive squad environments.

Our ambitious goal is to have 200 Swim Smooth Coaches worldwide by 2030—a true BEHAG (Big Empathetic Hairy Audacious Goal).

We're dedicated to elevating the standard of swim coaching across the globe, and these new coaches are a vital part of that commitment.

If you're a coach and passionate about advancing your coaching career and want to stay updated with how Swim Smooth can help develop your knowledge, skills, network, resources and standing in the community, I encourage you to join our coach-specific mailing list:

Join the List

…you'll be the first to know about our renewed and super-accessible coach certification pathway for 2025 and beyond, launching very soon!

Same, same - but different!

Our Class of ‘24 have each diligently prepared a single Swim Smooth session with their own unique twist and personality to give you a little inspiration this week. There’s some cracking sets to give a go! You’ll need access to the Swim Smooth GURU and remember you can get a free 7-day all-access pass to test out these sessions and print off for your records.

So, without further ado, please welcome:

Coach Candice Conrad from Dublin1 🇮🇪 and her challenging session, “No Rest for the Wicked!”
Coach Cyndy Hetrick from Arkansas2 🇺🇸 and her nice little CSS to start (or finish!) your week on a high, “Control Your Speed!”
Coach Ed Collins from Herefordshire3 🇬🇧 and his thoughtful pacing session, “Down & Back Up the Ladder”
Coach Jurgis Šeika from Vilnius4 🇱🇹 and his technique oriented session, “Disappearing Set”
Coach Lorna Richardson from Santa Monica, Los Angeles5 🇺🇸 and her coordination envoking session, “Find Your Rhythm”
Coach Marieke Blomme from Gent, Belgium6 and her open water session, simply titled, “Open Water Training”

Book a Session

Coaches Candice, Cyndy, Ed, Jurgis, Lorna and Marieke were all part of our Class of 2024 who sat their Certification in sunny Mallorca 🇪🇸 back in May/June this year. We still have 5 more new coaches lined up for you still undergoing assessment, so stay tuned if we haven’t got you covered yet as we have coaches in Brighton 🇬🇧, Cincinnati 🇺🇸, Mallorca 🇪🇸, Vienna 🇦🇹 and Occitane 🇫🇷 coming your way soon!

So, what difference can a single swim session make?

I was on the pool deck this week delivering one of our harder, Red Mist Endurance sessions when one of our swimmers seemed a little deflated after the session. I asked if they were OK and the response was:

“I’m just not very fit at the moment. I’ve been busy at work and only managing one session per week. How many sessions per week do you think I need to start improving and getting back on track again?”

I gave a very typical Newsome-response, “it depends!”

Surely, one extra session can't do much to nudge your fitness up and get you back on track can it?

As it happens, it can. Take a look:

How to improve swimming fitness — My own 12 week Fitness Curve within the Swim Smooth GURU

I’m nothing if not a guinea pig for testing every session, training plan, drill, exercise etc that I recommend to you here on this blog or within our sessions. If I’m recommending you do it, it’s because I’ve tried it first and found it to work effectively. This iterative process has been at the heart and soul of Swim Smooth over the last 20 years, so I’m hoping you’ve benefitted from it.

My sole goal over the past two winter months here in Perth, has been to stick religiously to a routine of 5 sessions per week, totalling 16km. Now, admittedly this is much more than my swimmer was asking given their single session per week, but the reality is, it’s much harder to shift your fitness ‘needle’ in the right direction when you’re already swimming very frequently than it is if you’re only doing one session per week:

How to avoid over training in swimming — Our at-a-glance dial to show you how your efforts are benefitting your swimming

That said, if you zoom in close on the graph above, you can see a subtle rise in fitness when I modified and extended just one of my sessions that week:

This all came about as my Sunday swim buddy, Chris, was away that weekend, so instead of getting up early for an ocean dip, I had a little lie in and hit the pool a bit later to do this Pure Technique session, “Perfect Your Stroke Rate”. This session focused on funnelling my base stroke rate from between +/- 8spm (strokes per minute) down to a perfect point for me (currently 74spm). It was also a lot of fun and made the 50 minutes or so fly by (always a bonus!).

Now, it wasn’t necessarily that specific session that gave me an upturn in my fitness off the two month ‘plateau’ but simply because I’d extended the session I had been doing on a Sunday from 800 to 1500m in the ocean to 2,500m in the pool with a little extra focus on my technique and intensity. So, why did this happen?

Well, for every swim session that you do, we can allocate a Swim Training Stress Score (or sTSS). This score is somewhat arbitrary, but is calculated from the amount of time you spend swimming at an intensity relevative to your Critical Swim Speed (CSS) - a short, easy session would give you a low score of say 25-30 points, whereas a harder, more intense session might give you a score of say 70+.

For reference, this particular session was 58.4 points for me, whereas my Monday morning 10 x 400 this week was 78.3. The point is though that these arbitrary numbers, when logged over time, help to determine the short-term FATIGUE (pink line on the graph) as well as the long-term FITNESS (blue line on the graph) that any single session will create. The difference between the two can be referred to as your FORM (green line on the graph).

Armed with this information and data - which you can automatically collect by connecting your Apple or Garmin watch to the GURU, or simply manually logging the distance you swam against the time it took you - it’s then very easy to see what a single session can do for your fitness. If you’re only swimming once or twice per week, an additional session can actually have a profound effect. If you’re already swimming four or more times per week, the effect will be more subtle.

In any case, whilst improving fitness and speed might not be your goal, if you’ve ever wondered what is the magic number for how many sessions make a difference, tracking your fitness curve in this way will really be an eye-opener and keep you motivated. For me, the goal has simply been consistency, and whilst my fitness hasn’t been rising, this consistency resulted in this somewhat unbelievable average pace result this week (look closely!):