Improve Your Training Through Interval Pacing with FORM
FORM Smart Swim Goggles capture in-depth swim and technique data, which HeadCoach™ turns into clear metrics and actionable insights to help you improve as a swimmer.
One advanced HeadCoach™ metric is your Interval Pacing, which measures how well you are holding your pace from length to length during each of your intervals.
You can find more information about HeadCoach™ and Interval Pacing by going to our Introduction to HeadCoach™ blog. In this blog, we’ll explore why Interval Pacing is critical for better swim performance, provide tips to help you pace intervals more effectively, and show how FORM goggles can help you improve faster.
What Is Interval Pacing and Why It Is Important
As you get faster in the water and start swimming longer distances, learning how to hold your pace consistently will help you develop better training habits that will lead to better performance in practice and your races.
Ideally, unless instructed otherwise, you should be holding a consistent pace throughout your intervals. If you try too hard at the start, and your speed drops at the end of your intervals, it means that you are using too much energy at the start and need to learn how to disperse your effort through your intervals more evenly. By starting a bit easier, you’ll have more energy to hold your pace for the whole distance and maximize your performance with each interval.
FORM goggles can measure your Interval Pacing in real-time. Our goggles will compare the times from every length for each interval and see how much your speed varies. The less your speed varies, the better your Interval Pacing will be.
At FORM, we measure Interval Pacing on a scale of 1-100 to help swimmers easily understand their benchmark and how much they can improve their Interval Pacing.
General Coaching Tips
When you are trying to improve your Interval Pacing, it is best to start on sets where you are swimming shorter intervals that have more than one length in them (i.e. 50m in a 25m pool). Taking more rest between your intervals will keep you fresh so that you have more energy to maintain your pace from start to finish on each interval. Try a set of 6 x 50s in a 25-metre or yard pool with 20-30 seconds in between each one. A set like this will make it easy for you to focus on improving your Interval Pacing.
To improve your Interval Pacing specifically, try these tips:
- Start your intervals easier, especially remembering to breathe at the start.
- Steadily build your effort. You might have to try a little harder at the end to hold your speed.
- Be consistent in your technique, especially as you tire.
When you feel you’ve improved your Interval Pacing, you can start increasing the difficulty. It’s best to match the difficulty with what you’re prepping for:
- Getting ready for a Pool Race? Stay with short intervals, but go faster while holding your pace, with lots of rest in between each length.
- Prepping for a Triathlon or Open Water race? Try holding your Interval Pacing for longer intervals, such as 100’s and 200’s, so that you can practice holding your pace for longer.
- General Technique Improvement? Taking less rest between your intervals will make the end of your sets harder, so you can practice holding your Interval Pacing when you’re tired.
Using FORM to Improve Your Interval Pacing
You can use FORM goggles to help improve your Interval Pacing in real-time by activating the Interval Pacing Skill in your goggles. The Interval Pacing Skill will give you immediate feedback about how well you are holding your Interval Pacing and guide you to improve it.
You can activate the Interval Pacing Skill in a few ways:
- When you are swimming a FORM Workout, you can activate it on the goggle screen.
- Or by using the Workout builder to create or edit a workout to include the Interval Pacing skill as part of the workout, then it will turn on automatically for you at that point in the workout.
To help guide you while using the Interval Pacing Skill, the goggles will save your time from the first length of your swim to give you an appropriate goal to hold for the rest of your interval. It is natural for many swimmers to be faster during their first length than the rest of their interval. However, FORM takes in your whole interval to give you your Interval Pacing score. So if you swim your first length 2 or 3 seconds faster than the rest of your lengths, but the rest of your lengths are the same time, you will still end with a strong Interval Pacing score.
You can keep track of your progress using the FORM App, where you can see your current Interval Pacing score, the history of your score, as well as some additional Coaching info about how you can improve your Interval Pacing.
Conclusion
FORM goggles will help you improve your Interval Pacing, and your technique overall much quicker so that you can be on your way to becoming a better, faster swimmer.
