Self Help Skills To Make Swimming Laps Less Boring

photo credit: rtv2k

Self Help Skills For Swimming

Now that I’ve just started my season in my outdoor pool, I thought that I would address an issue that many people get when it comes to swimming.  Consider it self help skills applied to one of the best all round exercises which is swimming.

As good as swimming is as a physical activity, it can also be boring and quite monotonous especially if one is just going back and forth the pool doing laps.  So here is how I manage to make my swim workouts a bit less boring so that I get through my laps.

Self Help Skills For Health

Actually, the self help skills here can be applicable for almost any workout or exercise that we have to do in order to keep healthy and fit.  As you know, boredom is a menace when it comes to out workouts so the ideas here will work no matter what type of workout you do.

For swimming, I start with a warmup including stretching.  The last thing I want is to pull a muscle when I’m in the water.  So I make sure that I’m adequately stretched before I jump into the pool.  For the first several pool sessions each season, I’m going to do fifty laps since it’s been several months since I’ve been in the water.

After my body has gotten use to the fifty laps, I’ll push it up to seventy laps for the remainder of the pool season.  But even with fifty laps, it can get quite boring if I don’t throw in a system to help me get through.

So this is what I do.  In terms of self help skills applied to exercise, the trick is to make the activity less boring by mixing things up a bit.  It will also help me focus so that boredom has no room in my mind.

For the first 20 laps, I will start with standard front crawl as my swimming stroke.  The first 10 is quite easy with the next 10 a bit more intense.  Then for the next 10 laps, I’ll switch to butterfly stroke (or at least my version of it – believe me, you would not want to see my butterfly).  This is the most intense part of my entire swim and it’s right in the middle of the workout.

After the 10 laps of butterfly, I’ll sort of recover with the next 10 laps of front crawl again which is a less intense swim stroke.  The final 10 laps of my workout is still front crawl but with even less intensity, closer to what I would be doing during my first 10 laps of the session.  This will bring me to my 50 laps in the pool.

Here is the full workout again;

Warmup with stretching before getting into the pool

20 laps front crawl

10 laps butterfly stroke

20 laps front crawl

Tread water with 2-3 different techniques for 30 kicks each

More stretching after the pool work

I’ll post up what I do to turn this swim workout into my more advanced 70 laps workout later on this summer when I get there to that point.  But in the meantime, you can see how I utilize self help skills so to speak to make my swim workouts less boring and therefore I’m able to get through them all summer long.

Self Help Skills From Poolside

If you missed my pool episodes from my Motivational WebTV series, catch the first one I did self improvement tips from poolside.  I did a few other videos with self help skills from the pool after that one and they are all listed at my Motivational Videos WebTV Archive.