Recovery training

This type of training refers to easy swimming used to hasten recovery from more intense training and from competitions. Recovery swimming stimulates and enhances the rate of improvement in aerobic capacity and anaerobic power. It also increases the amount of intense swimming that athletes can perform weekly because it hastens recovery from such training.

Training effects

Swim training depletes muscle glycogen, produces acidosis, and causes damage to muscle tissue. Athletes will soon lose their training adaptations, a condition known as failing adaptation or overtraining, if they do not have sufficient recovery time to replace the glycogen, eliminate the acidosis, and repair muscle damage. Swimming at low levels of intensity can speed the recovery and rebuilding process in muscles and surrounding tissues. Easy swimming maintains a high rate of blood flow throughout the body without causing any further depletion of muscle glycogen or tissue injury due to acidosis. Enhanced blood flow will cause more glucose to reach the muscles, where it can diffuse and be stored as glycogen. It will also increase the amount of proteins, vitamins, minerals, and hormones that reach the muscles so that they can repair and rebuild more rapidly. Finally, increased blood flow will increase the the rate at which lactic acid is removed from muscles so that their pH is restored more rapidly. 

Season planning

Recovery training should be scheduled after any training repeats that produce severe acidosis. The majority of certain weekly training sessions should also be devoted to recovery training when previous sessions may have caused severe depletion of muscle glycogen or considerable tissue injury. Because most of the acidosis and glycogen loss will be in the fast twitch muscle fibers, recovery training sessions can also include basic endurance training, seperate pulling and kicking drills, and stroke drills. Slow twitch muscle fibers will perform most of the work during basic endurance training, so the fast twitch fibers will have time to recover while swimmers continue to improve such aspects of aerobic endurance as cardiac output, blood shunting, and capillarization while also increasing mitochondria, lactate transporters, and perhaps myoglobin in slow twitch muscle fibers. 

Small amounts of more intense endurance training can also be conducted in secondary strokes in conjuction with recovery training. Training of this type will stimulate the respiratory and circulatory systems while allowing many of the major muscle fibers that swimmers use in their main stroke time to recover. The more dissimilar the secondary stroke is to the swimmer's main stroke the better, because different muscle fibers will be carrying the load while the depleted and injured fibers are recovering.

Guidelines for recovery training

Set length: 10 to 20 min minimum. Longer sets are recommended for recovery training sessions.

Repeat distances: Any distance is acceptable, although longer continuous swims are superior to shorter repeats for this purpose.

Rest intervals: Rest intervals should be short to save time. The length of the rest interval has little bearing on the effectiveness of recovery training.

Speed: Swimming speeds should be easy. Athletes will generally swim at the proper speed if instructed to swim at recovery intensity. For those who need guidelines, heart rates ahould be in the range of 90 to 120 bpm, perceived exertion should be 7 to 12 on a scale of 1 to 20, or athletes should feel that they are swimming at half speed or slower. Interspersing some short sprints can add an element of speed training to the recovery session.

Styles: Athletes should swim their main styles in recovery training. More intense training in other styles can be part of recovery training sessions to encourage additional circulatory and respiratory adaptations.