Finding a pool to train for military diving, rescue swimming and special ops programs can be challenging due to scheduling or the distance required to reach a local pool that’s big enough. Here is an email from a special ops recruit who can swim only one or two times a week but wants to optimize his time to be successful:
Hey Stew, I am preparing for Air Force Special Warfare (PJ, hopefully) and have two years to train but can only get into the pool 1-2 times a week. How would you arrange the swim workouts to fit this limited schedule? Thanks, Pete.
Great job on giving yourself plenty of time to prepare for your special ops journey. Many who succeed give themselves one to two years to fully prepare for all the elements of fitness needed to get accepted and graduate from the lengthy training pipeline. Here is what I would do with two days a week of swimming to get ready for the challenges of the Air Force pararescue (PJ) selection and pipeline:
Warmups/Cooldowns
These are great opportunities to add in pool skills that will be graded during your training. Warming up with a 5-minute swim and shooting for 300 meters will help you understand the competitive pace of a meter/second. For an above-average swim time in the 500 meter, an above-average score is 500 seconds, or 8:20. The 5-minute warmup is a quick assessment tool to see how you’re progressing to master that pace. Follow the 5-minute swim warmup with a 5-minute pool skill warmup, such as treading (no hands), bobbing (bouncing off the bottom of the 9-foot section), or other drownproofing skills.
The cooldown can be whatever you feel you need more practice doing. If you need more swimming, do a 5-minute cooldown swim of a mix of strokes. If you need more pool skills, try 1 minute of bobbing, floating, front flips, back flips, and traveling with arms and feet, simulated tied to mimic the drownproofing test.
Technique
Focus on your swimming technique, both freestyle and combat side stroke (or breaststroke). You will find you will need to learn freestyle and either of the other two options. During rest sets of swim workouts, try to add in an active rest of pool skills such as treading, bottom bouncing, and snorkel buddy breathing. All of these require a technique base, and they should be part of every swim workout.
Conditioning
Once you learn the technique of the swimming strokes and the skills above, don’t stop there. Master them, and build your endurance and muscle stamina so you can do them for 5-10 minutes easily. This means treading with no hands, bobbing, floating, and swimming on the surface and underwater for multiple sets. Eventually, you should work to find more time per week to get into the pool as you get enrolled into the delayed entry program (DEP) and start taking the Initial Fitness Test (IFT) to earn a contract to join the Special Warfare Enlistment Program.
Day 1 (no fins)
One day, focus on the swimming distances of 500m for the IFT. You can mix in sets of 50m, 100m, 250m and 300m to assess your conditioning each week. You may find you will want to add another day of this type of conditioning. That’s fine at first to double up on the no-fins workouts, but eventually, you need to prepare the legs for wearing fins.
Day 2 (fins)
Learning how to swim with fins using a combination of freestyle and side stroke is important as well. It takes some time to build your legs and ankles for the torque that kicking with fins applies to those muscles and joints. Build up to swimming nonstop with fins for 45 to 60 minutes, and shoot for 2,000 to 2,500 meters. We usually do this after a leg day to “top off leg day.”
As you near the end of your preparation, you’ll want to get to the pool four to five times a week, as your swimming training to become a PJ requires a higher level of commitment, especially if you’re a non-swimmer. If you grew up swimming competitively, you could likely get away with fewer swims per week as you should focus more on land durability, strength training and load bearing.
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