From: David Linker

I just started TI after reading Extraordinary Swimming for Every Body, and did my first drills today. I am excited, and have already seen positive changes. My question is how do I maintain fitness while starting the program?

Until this weekend, I was swimming a mile, two to three times a week, plus elliptical trainer 2-3 times a week. If I commit to not practicing bad habits, how will I maintain fitness for the next weeks or months?

From: Angus MacGowan

I’d say you’re already halfway there due to your cross training regime as it stands. Remember that whilst you will be unlikely to drill at the same intensity as you swim, you are not being inactive. I used a heart rate monitor when I was drilling to test my heart rate, and I found I was working at about 60% of maximum heart rate. While this is at the low end of what you need to create an aerobic training effect from a cardiovascular point of view, you’re still getting a benefit greater than you would sitting on the couch.

One suggestion is to increase the intensity of your elliptical trainer workouts. Perhaps make one of them an interval workout where you elevate your heart rate to a reasonably high level (e.g. 10 x 2 mins at 85-90% with a 1-2 min break between efforts). With the other, make it a workout similar to the effort you’d use to run a 5km race, i.e., a consistent solid effort for about 20 minutes, with warm-up and warm-down either side).

Fortunately, the elliptical trainer is non-impact, so you can raise the intensity of these workouts without too much fear of injury. If you are doing two elevated heart rate workouts like this, plus swimming gently 2-3 times a week, you will maintain a very reasonable level of fitness. At the worst, you will still have an excellent base of fitness that you will build up again progressively as you introduce whole stroke swimming.

From: Terry Laughlin

This is a question in which many new TI students will have a keen interest. It seems to me to include three, considerations:

1) How do I maintain general fitness?
2) How do I improve my swimming?
3) How do the two impact one another?

I'll address each individually:

1) Angus has given good advice for the first consideration. Depending on how much "re-engineering" your swimming form may need, you might want to increase your non-swimming exercise while reducing the intensity of your swim training. If weight maintenance and other general fitness goals are important to you, this will keep you covered.

Depending on how physically taxing those other workouts are, you probably should schedule them after swimming, or on a different day, so they don't cause you to be fatigued when working on swim skills.

2) If you already have good general fitness – demonstrated by decent endurance or work capacity in NON-swimming activities (i.e. you can run several miles or handle the non-swimming parts of a triathlon with reasonable ease) but can't swim a quarter-mile or more with similar ease, then your problem isn't with your aerobic system, it's that you become anaerobic too soon while swimming.

If so, you'll improve your swimming most dramatically and quickly by learning to stay aerobic (i.e. be able to use your “terrestrial fitness”) while swimming. That means replacing your "struggling skills" with habits of ease and economy.
" Swimming endurance" doesn't mean "how much work can I do?" It means being able to "repeat efficient swimming movements for a duration and intensity of your choosing."

3) There's only one way to accomplish the above – retrain your nervous system. And, for those with the most ingrained inefficiency, that means mainly drill practice – complemented by a bit of whole-stroke swimming – for a month or more.

As Angus points out, you're likely to maintain your heart rate at 60 to 70 percent of maximum even during drill practice. That level of workload will be sufficient to maintain basic aerobic fitness. Even better, it will be eliminating drag and non-propulsive movements from your stroke, which means even basic aerobic fitness will allow you to swim much farther without fatigue.
And as that happens, your swimming itself will make a greater contribution to your general fitness than it ever could before.