We hear a lot of open water swimmers, especially channel and marathon swimmers, talk about pain and injury – and fighting through it.

Perhaps the argument should not pit high-yardage vs. low-yardage programs, but instead address the challenge of responsibly increasing an athlete’s training yardage from one week to the next and from year to year. There are well-monitored high-yardage, and lower-yardage programs in the United States that responsibly increase their athlete’s training volume based on how they responded to the last training cycle. Likewise, there are high, mid and low yardage programs that irresponsibly increase their athletes training yardage, putting them at risk for injury or illness.

Indeed, many sports track the volume of their athlete’s work and recommend incremental increases. Baseball is an example. General Managers and athletic trainers monitor their pitchers total pitches and recommend an increase of 10-15% in workload from season to season. Injuries to baseball pitchers don’t occur when a player throws more than 200 innings. They happen when a player tries to jump from 120 innings to 200 innings in one season.

Using this logic, a swimmer who averaged 70,000 meters per week for a season can safely make the jump to an 80,000 meters per week average if they maintain their technique and increase their daily caloric intake; however, it may be more stressful for an athlete who averaged only 40,000 meters per week to train at a 50,000 meters per week average regardless of the precautions taken.

Tracking athlete’s responses to yardage volume and intensity is the only surefire way to knowledgeably increase an athlete’s workload in order to benefit from the training response while avoiding illness and reducing the risk of injury.

For more tips from the National Team High Performance staff, visit the National Team High Performance Tips archive.Copyright © 2012 by Open Water Source