If you’re planning to get fit in the water this year, you’re in luck! We've pulled together a four week swim workout plan to help you set and achieve your goals, whilst having fun and learning valuable new skills during your new year swim journey!

Why start swimming in 2016

Swimming is a sport that you can do all year round and feel great doing! With the added bonus of being a low impact, whole body workout, swimming is a great way to get fit in 2016.

Setting Goals

Before you start work out, you first need to figure out what you want to achieve, whether that is feeling confident in the water or swimming the length of the channel - set your goal as a starting point!

Commitment is the key to achieving your goals, and you want to be able to commit to a program that is realistic for a short period of time, that has achievable goals. For example, committing to swimming for 1 hr a week for 4 weeks will make a big change to your fitness levels and is achievable to fit in with a busy lifestyle. Remember, the key to sticking to your goal is consistency and repetition.

Ensure your program also allows for flexibility. Our lives change week to week but the one absolute key point is knowing that you will make time to go to the pool at some point each week to look after your body.

Four Week Swim Plan

Week 1: Building up your stamina

During week 1, start with a very basic workout focusing purely on swimming a smooth long stroke and building up your stamina.

Swimming in sets of two is a great starting point - try swimming 2 lengths with a 30 second break, and repeat.

You can mix up the strokes if you wish, the first week of the plan is not about pushing to a high intensity but sustaining the ability to breathe a smooth rhythmical breath for every lap that is swum.

Week 2: Legs

In week 2, try bringing a focus area such as the legs. Begin your workout with a nice and easy warm up with any stroke at a slow pace for around 2 / 3 lengths.

Once warmed up, it's time to focus on the legs. Move onto kicking only with a kickboard to isolate the legs, aiming to complete 4 lengths using the board and resting for 30 seconds in between each length.

Once you have completed four lengths using the kickboard, go back to swimming a full stroke for 3 laps then rest. Repeat this 2 times.

Top tip: For the greatest body workout, try to kick with your legs under the water and make minimal splashes as you swim! Remember this is not about getting out of the pool and feeling exhausted, but working your body and being able to breathe at the same time.

Week 3: Arms

This week now the focus becomes on arms. Again start with a gentle warm up, starting off where we left from in week 2, swimming 3 laps then rest then repeat 3 times.

Once warm, grab a pull buoy and swim one length just using your arms. Ensure that your stroke is smooth, the more splashes you make the harder and less efficient it becomes.

Once you have done this for 4 laps stopping at each end, begin 4 laps of the full stroke with no pull buoy. If at all you are finding that you lose your breathing rhythm or start to feel tight in your chest, stop and rest to get your breath back.

Week 4: Bringing Everything Together

During the final week of your programme, it's all about bringing everything together and pushing your body a little further.

Begin with a warm up for up to 10 minutes. The challenge here can be how many lengths can you swim in this amount of time, not as fast as you can as remember it is a warm up.

Then grab a kickboard - for this exercise you are going to kick for one length slowly, 30 second rest, followed by a second length as fast as you can pushing your body to its limit. Repeat this circuit 3 times.

Now, try an additional 2 lengths nice and slowly, trying not to make any splashes (it's much harder than it sounds). Follow these lengths by grabbing a pull buoy and swimming 2 lengths just using your arms to build up your strength - Repeat this 3 times.

The final exercise is to swim for a duration of 10 minutes seeing how many lengths you are able to complete in this time frame. During this final 10 minutes, challenge yourself to beat the number of lengths you completed during your warm up!

When it’s all over....

Ask yourself the following questions;

• How you did in that one month?
• Did you manage to meet all your targets?
• How does your body feel?

Once you have reflected then break for 1 week and look at starting a new program, again looking at what you want to gain from your training, changing things up from your last choice of program.

If you’d like to give yourself a challenge to work towards, why not take a look at the challenges in Zoggs Swim4Fitness programme. You can complete swims and log the distance – why not aim to ‘Escape from Alcatraz’ in February?!

Good Luck and Happy New Year!