Jazz Carlin's Swimming Fitness Tips and Stamina Workout

February 26, 2018

Double Olympic medallist Jazz Carlin spoke to the Swimming Times magazine about her targets for 2018 as well as her top fitness tips for swimmers.

Jazz Carlin’s top fitness tips for swimmers

Follow some of Jazz’s tips below to improve your swimming fitness in and out of the pool.

Set yourself a challenge.
Whether it be to enter a swimming event in the pool or open water, set yourself a target that you want to train for. The Great Swims are a great event to enter, with a range of distances. Most New Year resolutions are broken by the end of January, so make sure your goal is challenging but realistic.
For a week, make a note of what you eat.
At the end of the week, look to swap in one healthier ingredient for the next time you cook that dish.
Try out some new equipment this year.
Using training equipment is a vital part of my training and it is great to focus and isolate certain parts of the body. Hand paddles are great to strengthen shoulders, whereas fins are good for strengthening your kick.
Plan for the week ahead.
Make sure you know what session you are going to be doing before heading to the pool. By having a clear goal for each session, you know exactly what you are going to do and it makes it easy to go ahead and do it.
Increase your load each week.
Start by increasing your distance in your session and then once you are used to the distance, start to increase your effort each week.
If you have access to a heart rate monitor, look at working in heart rate zones.
Vary each session and work through the different zones.
Download an app where you can get access to various training plans and it can track your swimming data.

Endurance session to improve stamina

“My advice for someone trying to improve stamina would be to try and do a repetition, for example 50m or 100m and have between five and 10 seconds rest,” said Carlin.

“For example, 10x100m, aim to hit each 100m within 90 seconds and have five to 10 seconds rest between sets.

Jazz Carlin’s stamina endurance session

4x100m Freestyle, 10 seconds rest
4x75m Pull and paddles
4x50m Kick, 10 seconds rest
4x25m IM order (1 length of each stroke)

“Week by week, you should notice a difference in your fitness and try and test yourself, going faster on each rep or having less rest. This is great to improve your stamina and I use a lot of short interval training in my training week.

“Keeping a lot of variety in the sessions will help build up your strength. Doing different strokes and using some different types of equipment can help you focus on certain areas.”