Winners Club

Zone 4 is where it gets tricky. Of all 5 heart rate training zones, this one is the most dangerous🫢

It’s at this point that most over-training happens. Inspired by professional athletes, people push themselves to the limit without giving the body enough time to recover and supercompensate. This puts a lot of stress on the body, killing mitochondria they’ve worked so hard to build😪

Zone 4 training benefits👇

Training around anaerobic threshold builds power in muscles, which allows athletes to sustain very fast speed for longer. On top of that, it utilizes more muscle fibers, building mitochondria in fast twitch fibers👍

Zone 4 will ‘teach’ the body to tolerate lactate better.

Sample Zone 4 training sessions👇

This is the zone where intensity is very high and it may be tempting to go all out. The trick, however, is to avoid complete exhaustion and, instead stay within the 80% – 90% target heart rate zone❤️

Think of it as splitting a longer distance into smaller chunks and adding short recoveries in between (like splitting 5K effort into 5x1K efforts). That way you’ll be able to run every interval at speed just slightly over one you would maintain for the full distance and gradually train the body to hold it for longer.

As this kind of training builds a lot of fatigue, the advice is to start adding Zone 4 efforts only after spending enough time on aerobic base (around 40-60 hours in total). This will help to build endurance and improve recovery speed to tolerate the effort.

✅️ 2 sets of 4×2 minutes with 1 minute rest

✅️ 10×1 minute with 1 minute rest
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Hand paddles are most commonly used for swimmers looking to develop their upper body strength as they work the muscles in the back, chest, arms and shoulders. They do this by stopping the water from flowing through your fingers, allowing you to perform your arm pull with more power💪

Using hand paddles when training comes with huge benefits. They can help you to develop your swimming technique as you become much more aware of your arm pull and general swimming stroke. So, if you feel a lot of resistance when you pull, then your hand is positioned correctly, and you are pushing the maximum amount of water under your body to help you move🏊‍♀️

If you have a first stroke that could do with slowing down, then hand paddles will do this for you too as you have to work harder for each arm pull. If your stroke is slowed down then you can concentrate on areas of your body such as your head position or leg kick, so benefiting more than just your upper body.

🧐Cons of Swim Paddles

✅ ️There are some downsides to swimming too much with paddles right away. If your paddles are too big, you’ll cause too much strain on your shoulders, elbows, tendons, and ligaments.

✅️ You can get into the habit of spreading your fingers too wide on the paddles and then have that carry over to your normal swimming.
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WhatsApp: +971 58 578 0133