If you swim 5,000 meters per day, in a year you’ll have swum over 1,500,000 meters! 😮 That’s the equivalent of swimming through the Atlantic Ocean from New York City, USA to Havana, Cuba.
But if you’re not logging your swim workouts, it’s simply impossible to know how far you’ve actually gone. How do you know how much breaststroke you swam? How much kicking did you do?
This makes it hard to set goals and keep track of progress. That’s why we created MySwimPro – the most comprehensive swim training app in the world! With swim workouts for every level and in-depth analytics, MySwimPro is all you need to reach your goals!
How to Stay Accountable to Your Swim Training
There are lots of strategies to keep yourself more accountable, but these are some of our favorites:
- Tell people about your goals and write them down
- Track all of your workouts
- Evaluate your progress regularly
See Also: How To Set SMART Goals
We can’t emphasize workout tracking enough. Spending a few minutes post-workout recording what happened in the pool while it’s still fresh in your mind, or tracking your workout with a smartwatch will add a powerful layer of accountability to your swimming.
Why You Should Track Every Swim Workout
Logging your workouts becomes a habit. Eventually you get to the point where it is simply part of your routine, as essential to your workout as your swim cap and goggles. Self-monitoring has been shown to work over and over again in studies and research.
Olympian Caeleb Dressel keeps track of how he feels in the water, as well as his workouts. Katie Ledecky, one of the top female athletes on the planet, keeps track of her training to better communicate with her coach and also uses her workout log to share how she felt during swim.
Here are a couple ideas to make the most of logging your workouts:
- Push yourself to try a more challenging interval.
- Rank your effort at practice.
- Swim with fewer strokes per length.
- Take more dolphin kicks off the wall.
At the end of the day, if you want to swim faster in competition you have to swim faster in practice. This means doing things better week-in and week-out. It means being willing to escape your comfort zone regularly.
Your swim training log is home base for these things. On your phone, you can see what you’ve done and identify areas to improve.
Keeping track of your workouts is something that not only will help you be more accountable to your goals and help you become a more aware and self-responsible athlete, but it will also make you feel that your swimming is really yours.
Do you track your workouts? Share your strategy in the comments! Download the MySwimPro app for swim and dryland workouts, training plans, technique videos and more!
