Event Warmup

While warming up is an integral part of your every day workout schedule, on the day of your meet, your event warmup takes on special significance. If you don't do it well on any regular day, there's no problem, you can just adapt the next stage of your workout to recover. If you warmup poorly on race day? You've just blown six to twelve months of work. There's a lot of pressure there, I know. It makes a person not want to get out of bed on event-day, but cheer up. Competitive swimmers have been tackling this high-pressure situation for many years and survived. You can too. Here's how it's done.

Most swim meets are day-long affairs, starting in the wee hours of the morning and lasting until well after sundown. The warmup time for events like these usually starts around 7:00 AM and goes to around 9:00 AM. Everyone who has qualified for this meet and has an event today will be in the pool trying to get warmed up now. The pool will be very crowded. If you're one of those swimmers who likes to have a lane to themselves when they workout, get over it fast. In all likelihood you'll have the feet of one swimmer in your face while you feel your toes being tickled by the swimmer behind you. Don't be intimidated by the number of bodies in the pool, just get your distance in and move on to the next phase of the warmup.

How far do you need to go to be properly warmed up for your event? That distance will vary depending up on the swimmer. If your daily workout is somewhere near 1-2k, you'll really only need a 200 or so to get warmed up. If your daily workout is near 20k, it will be closer to 1.5k. Just do the distance at an easy but strong pace. What does this mean? When I say, "easy" that means don't go balls-to-the-wall fast. That's a recipe for pulled muscles and disaster. Don't go slow either, though. By "strong" I mean that you should be able to feel the water resist you as you pull and against your feet. Stress your muscles just enough that you get some power from your strokes and kick. Once you feel your body able to smoothly accept your commands for power and efficiency that you've trained all year to instill into your muscle-memory, you're done and ready to move onto the next phase of warmup.

Now if warming up our muscles was all there was to getting ready for your event, we'd be done. However, every pool, and every year of preparation is different and you'll need to test your body and its interaction with the pool at speed in order to be truly prepared for your event. Towards the last 30 minutes of the warmup time, swimmers and coaches will gather at the lanes at the sides of the pool in order to do this last bit of preparation. Sprinters practice their starts, do a 25, and into one flipturn. Think of this like the drag racers practicing at the starting line before their race. They're testing their machines and how they react to the track. This is exactly what you're doing. You've done up to a year of training to get to this point so your body will be different from the last time you did this. Feel how the pool reacts to the power that you put into it. Is the variation in water temperature different form your workout pool making the water feel different? Is the variation in the depth of the pool causing an interference with your stroke as you ride over it? How does the wall design and markings affect your approach to your turn? As a sprinter, you only get one chance at these obstacles in your race so you'd better find out now how they affect your stroke.

If you're a distance swimmer, do some 50s at your race pace. Feel how well the lanelines impede the wave action from the other lanes. If they don't, drafting will be very easy. Adjust your strategy accordingly. Find out the most efficient way to approach and attack the walls for your flipturns. Adjust your timing to the wall to adjust to differences to your workout pool. If there are depth variances in this pool, get a feel for how you're going to react to them proactively and not let them slow you down. This is your time to make sure that you understand this pool as well as you can before you have to put it all on the line in a race. Make it count.

Now if your event is close to the warmup time, you're ready to go. However, as we all know, swim meets are many-hour long affairs. After two hours or so of staying warm and loose, even the best of warm-ups starts to wear off. So how can we make sure that your body is warmed up and ready for your race even if it's six hours after the warm-ups? Well for higher-end competitions, that's not a problem. The pool complexes used for these events have several pools available to competitors and as such, around an hour before your event is scheduled, you can warm up in this pool to keep your body ready for your race. In other swimming meets held at facilities that have only one pool, you have to be creative.

When you feel your warmed up body start to get stale during the day, you're going to need to warm your body up again a bit in order to stay at peak readiness. In my days of swimming meets, I've tried calisthenics, isometrics, and even warm showers to stay warm. Calisthenics can be useful in order to get the heart-rate up but you need to be careful that you don't jar joints or over do. Ten jumping jacks, pushups, or situps will usually work. Isometrics can be used to since they're a lot easier on the joints. You can mimic your stroke with one hand and create slight resistance with the other to stay warmed up. A warm shower can even work as long as you don't let your body get too hot or cold since both will sap your energy.

When you approach your race you want to feel that your body is as ready as it can be for the trial ahead. You've worked and trained your body for up to a year and you have fine tuned yourself with an excellent warmup. Now it's time to see what you can do.