Training for distance swimming typically includes three or more swimming workouts per week. Each workout should have a specific training objective, usually:

• Technique – improve freestyle stroke efficiency
• Threshold – improve speed that can be maintained without exhaustion
• Endurance – improve ability to swim for a long time

If you’re new to distance swimming, most of your workouts should be focused on developing your efficient freestyle technique. If you’re fighting the water, cannot breathe seamlessly within your stroke cycle, or can’t swim 400 yards smoothly at an even pace, it makes little sense to work on either threshold pace or endurance. Any amount of swimming inefficiently – especially at higher intensity levels – only reinforces poor movement patterns and slows your development as a distance swimmer.

Here’s a general development plan for distance swimmers:

1. Learn your best distance swimming technique (technique training).
2. Build the speed you can maintain for longer distances (threshold training).
3. Improve your ability to swim for long distances (endurance training).

Once you can swim 400 yards smoothly at a consistent pace, you can overlap development of your threshold speed and endurance.

As hinted above, this three-step approach isn’t just a learning sequence. It’s a regular, usually weekly, workout cycle. For distance training, you always need to work on your technique, threshold speed, and endurance. In all three cases, the old adage of use it or lose it holds true!

So, when it comes to technique, threshold or endurance, train all three regularly!