It depends on your training goals. Are you focused on cardio or also strength and speed? If you want to improve speed, you need to do high intensity sprints, and trust me, after those, you will definitely want to rest. You won’t feel like you are wasting time. Go about 80% of your max speed for 8 sets of 100m freestyle, for example, resting 20 seconds between each. Repeat with 100m IM but without fins if you can. This can be part of your main workout set. For the rest, continuous swimming with brief 5 to 10 seconds of rest is fine. Balancing both cardio and hard sprints is ideal. To improve, you need to feel tired in both your muscles and lungs. If you’re not, you might want to push yourself a bit more
Hi I’m studying to be a PE teacher and I came across your question in my study materials tonight. Failing to rest can lead to stagnation in your skills and energy. You’re doing great by giving yourself rest days, and I’d hate for you to get so worn down or injured that you have to stop swimming for weeks. So now consider how resting and hydrating during your workouts can also benefit you. You’re building endurance muscles by swimming long distances, but endurance is just one part of overall fitness. If you want more power in your swimming and faster times, you need to build strength with high intensity interval training. If you’re happy with endurance swimming—which is impressive—then instead of adding rest, consider changing your fitness goals. It’s up to you how to structure your workouts, but if you want to reach specific goals, you need to train in ways that align with them
There’s nothing wrong with just getting in the pool and swimming steadily if that’s all you want. But if you feel you’ve hit a plateau and want to go faster, you’ll need to do things that challenge your body in different ways. This is how training promotes improvements. Take weight lifting as an example. If someone uses the same weight for the same exercise with the same repetitions every time, they may see some progress at first, but then they stall out and stop improving.
For you, it comes down to your goals. If you want to maintain a faster pace, then you need to spend time swimming at that pace or even below it. For instance, if you wish to sustain a 1:45 pace for 1k, then practice swimming sets of 100m at that pace with a 2:00 interval. Once that becomes easy, either lower the interval time or increase the number of 100m sets.
Also, there are so many other things you can do in the pool besides swimming straight. You can focus on sets for power and distance per stroke or work on intervals for breath control, under-waters off the walls, technique drills, pacing for various distances, and different strokes. Working on all these areas makes you a more rounded swimmer and can keep things exciting.
I’m not saying you have to do everything to improve, but pushing beyond your comfort zone is how we better ourselves
It’s a lot like running. What you’re doing now is similar to going for a relaxed run around your neighborhood. Sometimes you run hard, and other times you take it easy, but it’s basically a continuous run. Meanwhile, track workouts are structured like pool workouts. Runners go to the track to get faster, doing intervals with rest between them. This structure helps runners learn how to run fast. Similarly, structured pool workouts with shorter timed intervals help you learn to swim fast
A key principle of training is Specificity-Overload-Progression. Your training is limited by the Onset of Blood Lactate Accumulation. In simple terms, interval training will push your body to handle lactic acid better. By slightly exceeding your Maximum Lactate Steady State, you’ll help your body adapt to coping with higher levels of lactic acid or producing less of it while working at an aerobic level. Set your workout intervals, with rest, at 4 to 5 seconds faster per 100 than your average for your 1.5k-3k sessions to see improvement. Progression requires you to make your training speeds quicker as you get better
This can get complex. There’s plenty of research around High Intensity Interval Training. I’m 80 years old and have competed for much of my life. In high school and college, I focused on accumulating mileage. I even won a National Masters Championship in the 1,500. I was part of several World Record Relay teams. Since that was my goal, I eased back on competitive swimming in my 70s. During COVID, I stopped competing altogether to focus on coaching. Now that I’m 80, I’m getting back into serious training. However, I’m not doing mileage. I’m focusing on short distances, maximum effort for 40 seconds, with long rests of 2 minutes in between. I’m still figuring things out. Building up to maximum effort feels difficult since I usually rely on pacing. At my age, it’s important not to push too hard for now, given that my skills outpace my conditioning. But I’m enjoying the process
One of the key ideas behind doing sets is to adjust your intensity level. You can’t maintain threshold pace for an entire workout, but hitting threshold pace is vital not just for your cardiovascular fitness but also your muscular endurance. If you don’t take rest, your form usually slips towards the end if you haven’t built enough endurance to keep it solid over that distance. Sets allow you to refine your form and gain more benefits from the distance you’re swimming
You are completely wrong. Congrats on your speed improvement, but you can enhance your speed much more by doing shorter, faster sets focused on technique. A 1:53 per 100m isn’t bad for a 3K pace, but it’s still quite slow overall and suggests you haven’t mastered many of the basics yet