Plan the week before you plan the workout
Most coaches write one practice at a time. That's backwards. A single practice only makes sense in the context of what came before it and what's coming after. If you write Tuesday without knowing what Monday and Wednesday looked like, you'll stack hard days on top of each other or leave a week with no clear purpose. Start with the week as the unit of planning. The daily workout is just how you fill in that structure.
Set a weekly target based on where you are in the season
Before you write a single set, decide two numbers: total volume for the week and the intensity distribution across that volume. Both should shift with the season, not stay fixed all year.
- Early season (base phase): highest volume, lowest average intensity. Most work sits in aerobic endurance and aerobic capacity zones. This is where you build the tank the rest of the season draws from.
- Mid-season (build phase): volume holds steady or drops slightly. Intensity climbs. Threshold and VO2-max work take a bigger share of the week.
- Pre-competition: volume drops noticeably. Race-pace and speed work dominate. You're now converting fitness into performance, not building more fitness.
- Taper and meet week: volume drops sharply again, intensity per rep stays high but total quality work shrinks. This gets its own treatment — see the taper-week-structure guide for how to sequence that final 7-10 days.
For zone definitions and how to calculate them off a recent time trial, use the energy-system-zones guide. This article assumes you already know what your group's threshold and aerobic pace look like.
Spread the energy systems so hard days don't stack
The most common weekly planning error isn't picking the wrong sets — it's putting two hard days back to back, or worse, three. Recovery from a real threshold or race-pace session takes longer than most coaches think, especially for age-group swimmers still building work capacity.
A workable rule: no two high-intensity days in a row, and never more than two high-intensity days total in a 6-day week for anyone under senior elite level. Everything else is aerobic endurance, technique, or active recovery.
Think of the week in four categories and assign each practice one primary label:
- Aerobic base — long steady swimming, moderate effort, builds the engine.
- Threshold — sustained efforts at or just below lactate threshold pace, the backbone of mid-season quality work.
- Race-pace / speed — short, high-quality reps at or faster than target race pace, full rest.
- Active recovery — low intensity, technique focus, kick and drill heavy.
A normal week rotates through these so a threshold day is always followed by aerobic or recovery work, never by another threshold or race-pace day.
Build one practice structure and reuse it
Swimmers and coaches both do better with a predictable skeleton. Predictable doesn't mean boring — it means the swimmer knows what kind of effort is coming in each phase of practice, so you spend less time explaining and more time coaching.
- Warm-up (800-1500m): progressive, includes some stroke and starts drills. Same rough shape every day.
- Main set: the day's primary energy system target. This is where the label from your weekly plan lives.
- Secondary set: complements the main set without competing with it. After a threshold main set, a technical kick set. After an aerobic main set, some short race-pace speed work to keep neuromuscular sharpness without adding real fatigue.
- Kick/pull: rotates focus — dryland-adjacent strength one day, technical stroke work another.
- Cool-down: 400-600m easy, always.
Example threshold main set for a senior group: 5 x (4 x 100 @ threshold pace on 1:20, 20 seconds easy between reps) with 1:00 rest between rounds. If threshold pace is 1:10 per 100, that's 16 reps at 1:10-1:12 landing on a 1:20 send-off — enough rest to hold pace, not enough to fully recover, which is the point of threshold work.
Meet weeks and taper weeks change the rules
During a normal training week, you're building fitness — volume and cumulative fatigue matter. During a meet week or taper, you're expressing fitness — freshness matters more than load. Cut secondary sets first. Keep race-pace work but shorten it. Protect sleep and reduce total practices before you reduce intensity. The detailed day-by-day sequencing for that final stretch is covered in the taper-week-structure guide — don't just guess by feel here, the order of the last 10 days matters as much as the content.
Sample mid-season week (6 practices)
- Monday — Aerobic base: 5000m total, main set 3 x 800 aerobic pace, easy kick set.
- Tuesday — Threshold: 4500m total, main set 16 x 100 @ threshold on 1:20 as above, technical pull secondary set.
- Wednesday — Active recovery: 3500m total, drill-heavy, no set faster than aerobic pace.
- Thursday — Aerobic capacity + speed: 5000m total, main set 8 x 200 at moderately hard aerobic effort, secondary set 6 x 25 all-out with full rest.
- Friday — Threshold: 4000m total, shorter threshold main set, more skill work.
- Saturday — Race-pace: 3500m total, main set built around actual race distances at goal pace, full rest between reps.
Total: roughly 25,500m for the week, split across four aerobic-leaning days, two threshold days spaced apart, and one dedicated race-pace day — no two hard days touching.
Where SwimIQ fits
Once you know the week's shape — which days are aerobic, which are threshold, which are race-pace — SwimIQ helps you get each individual practice down fast and check it against that plan. Photograph or dictate the set, and it structures the practice into warm-up, main set, and cool-down, then flags the zone each set actually trains so you can confirm Tuesday didn't quietly turn into another threshold day.