12-week plan · Free
Aerobic Builder
Lay the foundation. Everything else builds on this.
This plan is built to help you minimize resistance, transfer your drill practice into your actual freestyle stroke, and understand pacing through negative split, build, and descend sets. It's not an easy plan, it takes patience, persistence, and consistency, but it works whether you're racing a 70.3, an Olympic distance, or a full IRONMAN.
What this plan focuses on
Technique
Minimizing resistance by keeping your head, hips, and heels aligned on the surface. The drills look basic. Mastering them is the foundation for everything that follows.
Developing your stroke
Transferring what you learn in drills into full-stroke swimming. The efficiency you build slowly in isolation has to carry into longer, faster sessions.
Pacing
Negative splits, descends, and builds, so you understand how to use your energy deliberately, in training and on race day.
How the plan works
Two swims a week, 24 workouts over 12 weeks, each one building on the last. Here's what's inside every session.
Warm up
Easy swimming, some fast sprinting, and breathing work, designed to get you wet, loose, and comfortable before the real work starts.
Skills & drills
A specific drill each session, slowed right down, so you actually fix the thing it's meant to fix rather than rushing through it.
Main set
Where fitness gets built and technique gets tested under fatigue. Different intensities for different goals, some fast, some steady, always with a clear purpose.
Cool down
Your best technique, saved for last, since it's what your body remembers walking out of the pool.
Open water sessions
Two sessions in every plan built to get you comfortable with race conditions before race day, always with a buddy, always where lifeguards are on duty.
Progressive build
Every workout builds on the one before it. Week 12 is meaningfully harder than week 1, on purpose.
Sample workout
Warm up
Get comfortable in the water on the easy swim. Then get your heart rate and stroke rate up on the sprint piece.
1 x 100 Easy 1 x 100 Alt 25 Sprint / 25 Easy
Skills & drills
Focused entirely on balance and alignment, a straight line from head to toe, floating as high as you can. Perfect technique matters more than speed here. Fins recommended.
3 x 50 Alt 25 Balance Drill (hands at side) / 25 Freestyle 1 x 100 Freestyle, focused on your line 3 x 50 Alt 25 Balance Drill (hands at side) / 25 Freestyle
Main set
Hold the best freestyle you can through the whole set. As you fatigue, fight to keep your balance and your line. Rest 20 seconds between every repeat, if that's not enough, slow your pace rather than cutting the rest.
1 x 75, 50 Easy / 25 Fast 1 x 100, 75 Easy / 25 Fast 1 x 150, 100 Easy / 50 Fast 1 x 200, 100 Easy / 100 Fast 1 x 150, 100 Easy / 50 Fast 1 x 100, 75 Easy / 25 Fast 1 x 75, 50 Easy / 25 Fast
Cool down
1 x 200 Snorkel Swim, focus on great alignment
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