All green baby!

Week 6 has been a week of breakthroughs. I managed to have a high quality week with every workout executed to perfection while at the same time having an amazing swim workout on Friday.

The breakthrough idea for the swim came from one video I watched by Lionel Sanders (you can see the video below) where he talks about the wrong way to swim.

The general idea is that we are all used to pushing through to get faster. You want to be faster on the bike? Push harder. You want to run faster? Push harder. You want to swim faster? Swim smarter.

Water is a much denser medium than air and it’s very unforgiving to our bodies. You can’t really force your way through it but what you can do is use it to your advantage and by focusing on swimming with the water you will use less effort and be faster.

You always hear: “Focus on technique!” and you know it to be true but when someone tells you: “Don’t be stupid and try muscling your way through the water!” it just sits sooooo much better in your head.

I felt like I was working a little less but my pace never entered the 1:50 min/100m. I am a 1:40-1:45 min/100m swimmer when I am close to my first races of the season. Now, I swam a bunch of 1:46s, 1:44s, and capped it off with two 1:40s for the last two intervals!

I exited the water and was thinking about doing a few more of those sets (100 pull + 100 front crawl) but I am curbing my enthusiasm just so I don’t overdo it.

I love going into the pools finally! I am excited about each session and I just feel I am improving exponentially this time around.

On another note. I usually feel drained at the end of the week when all the workouts start adding up and now I feel I can do one more workout. One more set. Just a little bit extra.

I think that’s mainly because I am taking most of the stuff pretty serious. I train in the prescribed zones, I try to rest as much as possible. I use my Compex pretty much after every workout to massage the muscles that have been working for 1 or more hours.

I am still cleaning up my eating habits but it’s all moving into the right direction which is exciting and comforting at the same time.

I will be now on a huge break of 5 weeks which I’ll start off with a 4 day trip with my family so that week 7 will look a little wonky with most of the workouts crammed into the first 4 days but I think I arranged them in a way where I can recover properly between them and get the best out of it.

Once I am back from the trip I have the second recovery week with a new round of testing where I will truly see how much I improved. But more on this in the coming weeks.

Let’s check out the numbers and head into a new week.

*estimated by my scale

All parameters are moving in the correct directions and I am really happy about the progress there.