Routine

Question
I used to swim competitively until I was 13 years old, now I抦 25 and I抳e been swimming for 3 weeks in order to loose weight. Right now I抦 swimming 2,500 meters every day, five days a week, in approx. 1 hour.  I feel great, and I have lost weight too, but I'm swimming pretty much whatever I feel like.

I would appreciate if you can provide me a weekly routine. My freestyle, back and breastroke are pretty solid, but I can only swim 50 mts butterfly so far.

Thanks for the advice.  

Answer
Marie,
Thank you so much for writing.  I know exactly how you feel about getting back in swimming shape.  It's very difficult to swim on your own as well.  I personally like to have someone else develop the workouts.  It just makes things easier.

I think that you should do a couple of things.  First of all, I would increase your yardage every week. I will go up to about 3000 next week and 35000 the week after that.  I think that swimming 3000-4000 is a good level for most adults.  This should include a good warm up, a main set with interval work, and a long cool down.  Adults need a longer cool down that age groupers.  We just don't recover as quickly.  :-)

I am going to give you some good online reources for workouts.  I think that you can pick and choose what you feel is best.  If I gave you workouts via this method, I would be just guessing at what you need.  You did say that your butterfly is some need of help.  I would suggest you just continue working on your fly.  Incorporate it into your workouts more.  Also, see if there is anyone at the pool you swim at who can look at your stroke to make improvements.  

Here are some good sites with workouts on them:
1. http://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/
This is a good site. Swimming World has been around for a while.  They have a customizeable swim workout link on the top of their page.

2. http://www.wetworkouts.com/  This is a good site, but you have to pay for workouts.  This might not be as good.

3. http://www.trinewbies.com/  This is a triathalon site, but they have good workouts under their "Trainig Programs".  They have swimming workouts there.

4. http://www.swimmingtraining4life.com/  I have never used this site, but it looks promising.

I hope that this helps you out a bit.  Please let me know if this was helpful.  Also, I would love to know if the sites I provided helped you out.  I never know if what I like will be good for others.

Thank you again for writing.  Swim hard!
Eric