How Much Do Elite Swimmers Actually Train?

1,093.8 kilometres.

That is what Chad swam between the 3rd of January 2022 and the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham at the start of August. I know it to one decimal place because I wrote every session and logged every swim as it happened, and I still have the spreadsheet.

Four months after that season closed, he won two world titles in Melbourne and swam a PB at 30.

I am publishing the number because almost every answer to this question online is either a guess or a figure lifted from a distance programme written forty years ago. You will see 100km a week quoted a lot. For some distance swimmers, in some phases, that is real. For a butterflyer preparing to race a 200 and a 50, in the season I am about to describe, it was nowhere near.

Here is what it actually looked like.

The headline numbers

Thirty-one weeks. 223 swims. 1,093.8 kilometres.

The average full training week was 52.8km across about ten swims. The biggest weeks were 60km, and there were two of them, back to back in March. The biggest single session was 7.2km. The average session was 5.15km.

So the honest range is this: most working weeks sat between 45 and 60km, spread across five or six days, almost always as doubles. Not 100. Not 30.

Week by week

The first thing to notice is how uneven it is.

If you had asked me at the start of the year to draw the season, I would have drawn a smooth build with a taper on the end. That is not what happened, and I do not think I have ever coached a season where it did.

What actually happened was three separate mountains with valleys between them.

Every time the body allowed it, the load went straight back to the same plateau of 50 to 60km. And every time something went wrong, it fell off a cliff.

The weeks that were zero

This is the part that usually gets left out, so I want to put it near the top rather than bury it.

Roughly five and a half of those thirty-one weeks were lost or heavily reduced to illness.

Weeks three, four and five of January went 7.0km, zero, and 3.0km. The note I wrote on the calendar at the time reads: "Chad has been ill since the previous Wednesday. He is recovering and planning to swim in Cape Town at the end of the week." The recovery that week was stretching, gym activation and ozone therapy before a gentle 3km back in the water.

Then it happened again in April. After South African Nationals he took a scheduled week off, and the comeback was rough. He trained alone in South Africa struggling with sinus and managed 16km. He arrived in Dubai the following week and could not join the intensity, so he floated through it for 25km.

And then in June, having built all the way back up to 55km weeks in Istanbul, he went to the World Championships in Budapest, raced the 50 fly on the opening morning in 23.86, missed the semi-final, and bronchitis ended his meet before the 100 and the 200.

Six weeks later he took Commonwealth silver in the 200 fly.

I am not telling you that to be dramatic. I am telling you because the shape of that season is the most useful thing in it, and you would never see it in a highlights reel.

What a full week actually looked like

When the season ran properly, the rhythm barely changed:

• Ten swims a week, doubles Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, singles Wednesday and Saturday.

• Mornings were the aerobic engine. A standard opener, kick work, technique and efficiency testing, then long threshold sets like 12x200, 10x300 or 8x400

• Afternoons were quality. Race pace work in blocks of 25s and 50s, suited efforts, resisted and overspeed sprint work

• Racing was folded in. He raced eight times that season and only rested properly for two of them

Here is a real one, printed exactly as I wrote it at the time. Tuesday evening, 1st March, 6.1km, in the 50m pool at Seapoint.

Warm up

• 800 Choice

• 600 Pull/Kick

• 400 IM Drill Swim w/Fins

• 4x50 Descend 1-4

• 100 EZ

Main set: 10x300

1. Pink5 @3.30

2. Pink4 @4.00

3. Red6 @3.30

4. Pink4 @4.00

5. Red7 @3.30

6. Pink4 @4.00

7. Red8 @3.30

8. Pink4 @4.00

9. Have Some Fun @3.30

10. Pink4 @4.00

Then

• 10x50 Kick w/Fins, odds have a 10m spike

• 500 EZ

Pink is steady aerobic, Red is threshold and above. The number is the RPE level inside that band.

Here is the whole scale, since it runs through every session in the archive. The colour is the zone. The number after it is the RPE, 0 to 10.

• White, RPE 1 to 3. Low aerobic. Comfortable, you could hold a full conversation. Technique focus.

• Pink, RPE 4 to 5. Aerobic. Somewhat hard, breathing controlled but purposeful. Feels like work.

• Red, RPE 6 to 8. Threshold. Very hard but sustainable. The lactate clearance zone.

• Orange, RPE 8 to 10. Aerobic power, 400 race pace. Breathing very laboured, short bursts only.

• Blue, RPE 8 to 10. 200 race pace. Near-maximum, explosive, full rest between reps.

• Purple, RPE 8 to 10. 100 race pace. Maximum sustained effort at high stroke rate.

• Green, MAX. Max speed, 50 race pace. The fastest you can physically move.

Orange, Blue, Purple and Green all sit at the top of the RPE range. What separates them is the race distance they are built around, not how hard they feel. Chad's 2022 season used every zone except Purple.

Now look at what is actually doing the work there, because it is not the distance and it is not the effort scale.

It is the thirty seconds. Same 300 metres, every single rep. The hard ones come around on 3.30, the steady ones on 4.00. That gap is the entire difference between work and recovery in this session. The odd reps climb a ladder from Pink5 up to Red8. The even reps are all Pink4, so he is never actually resting, he is just changing gear.

And rep nine says "Have Some Fun". After four graded efforts I wanted him to take the handbrake off and swim it however he felt. That one is in the plan on purpose.

That is a hard session. It is not a clever one. Most of them were not, and that is rather the point.

The five phases

Written out as blocks, the season goes like this.

January was a false start. Two proper weeks, then illness took most of three.

February and March were the engine room, based in Stellenbosch. Eight weeks totalling 415km, doubles nearly every day, with racing folded straight into training. This is where the season was actually built. My note on the biggest week just says "Brilliant week, crazy intensity, went hard every day!"

April was Nationals and the reset. The trials in Gqeberha booked the Birmingham place, then a week off, then the sinus. Four weeks, 41km.

May and June were the travelling block. Dubai, the Mare Nostrum tour, Istanbul, then Budapest. 322km, and the hardest set of the whole season sits in the middle of it.

Late June to August was Plymouth and the taper. Three hard weeks, a short course rehearsal meet at Dawlish where he swam 1:49.6 for the 200 fly, then the taper: 35km, 33km, 16km, and a final session of 2.2km the day before racing began.

For context on that Dawlish swim: five months later he won the world title in 1:48.27. The speed was already sitting there in July, in a small pool in Devon, unrested.

What this means if you are not Chad

The number is not the lesson. If you take one thing from this, please do not take "swim 52km a week."

Three things actually transfer.

Every block had a different job. The weekly shape stayed fairly constant, but what the work was actually for changed completely as the season moved. You can read it straight off the session titles.

In February the sessions are called things like "Stroke Efficiency to Speed", "Introduce Sprint Free Drills" and "Modified USRPT". Broad, general, building the tools. By April, coming back off illness, they are "Intro to 200 RP", then "Quarter Speed", "Half Speed", "Full Speed". Pace reintroduced in graded doses.

By Plymouth in late June, speed is not one thing any more. It is five: "Dive Speed", "Surface Speed", "Kick Speed", "Front End Speed", "Speed Endurance".

The closer the target got, the narrower and more specific the work became. That progression is the season. The kilometres are just what carried it.

He restarted without renegotiating. Three illness blocks, and each time the plan went back to the same 50 to 60km week. No rebuilding phase, no starting again from the bottom, no lowering the target for the season. I think that is the single biggest reason the taper worked in July.

Intent is everything. Almost nothing in that archive is written as "hard", "fast" or "max", because those words leave far too much to the imagination. Two swimmers read "hard" completely differently, and the same swimmer reads it differently on a Tuesday than on a Friday.

So instead it is "200 RP", or "Blue9", or "7x50 Fly, 17 strokes, at 8.00". Every one of those is something you can hit or miss, which means the swimmer knows exactly what the set is asking before they push off the wall.

That is the habit worth stealing, and you can copy it at any volume. It costs nothing to write a number instead of an adjective.

What it produced

Commonwealth silver in the 200 fly on the 31st of July in Birmingham, an 18th Commonwealth Games medal, which at the time tied the all-time record.

Then in December in Melbourne, gold in the 200 fly in 1:48.27, an African record and the fastest short course 200 fly of his career, and gold in the 100 fly three days later.

Two world titles, off a season that lost five and a half weeks to illness and gave up most of a World Championships.

The whole thing, session by session

Everything above comes out of a document I put together from the original coaching archive. It is 40 pages: the full season review, the week by week calendar, and then all 121 written sessions printed exactly as they were written at the time. Shorthand, abbreviations, mid-set second thoughts, the times logged straight into the plan as they happened.

As far as I know there is nothing else like it online. Not a summary of an elite season, the actual six months of it.

It comes free with any order over £20 in the shop.

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And if you would rather have a season written for you than read someone else's, that is what I do.