How to Set Swim Goals That Actually Improve Your Fitness

If you swam competitively growing up, you’ve likely endured many goal-setting meetings with your coaches. Often, these sessions focused on achieving a specific time, such as a cut for a state championship or meeting a threshold to move up to a more advanced training group. 

In such cases, and largely for any kind of competitive swimming, getting faster was likely the primary focus. 

For some Masters swimmers, time-focused goal-setting may still be an integral part of your preparation. Many among us are striving to win races, get faster to break records, or simply beat a personal best. 

But for others, a focus on simply improving fitness and keeping your swimming habit sustainable may actually be more important now. 

If you’re among the latter group, you may be wondering how best to approach this slightly different type of goal-setting with its less specific data point guide posts. 

Defining Improved Fitness

So how can you tell if your fitness has improved? Quite simply, pick a data point to measure routinely. 

Even if you’re not going for a specific race time, using the clock at the pool can be useful for helping gauge whether you’re swimming faster or slower and whether that translates into more perceived effort or less. 

You can also look to how you feel overall. Consider these questions as guidelines for determining whether your fitness has improved:  

• After a tough workout, how long does it take for you to feel fully recovered? 

• How soon can you log another intense, high-quality workout? 

• How sore do you feel after a tough workout? 

• How well are you sleeping and do you wake up feeling refreshed and ready to go again?

• Have your body metrics changed? For example, have you lost weight or gained muscle? Has your resting heart rate dropped? 

• Are you consistently making gains on the metrics you’re measuring or have you started to plateau?

This self-monitoring is a key way of enhancing engagement in physical activity while supporting long-term behavior change. This can all lead to a more sustainable swimming habit and improved fitness over the long term. 

You don't need sophisticated technology to do this. A simple swim log will do. After each workout, write down:

• Total distance 

• Workout duration

• Average pace

• Heart rate

• Perceived effort

Over time, these data points can help reveal whether your fitness is actually improving. For example, if your average 100-yard pace drops from 2:15 to 2:00 while you maintain the same effort level, your aerobic fitness has likely improved.

Setting SMARTer Goals for Better Fitness

No matter the specific goal you’re aiming for, the SMART approach has been shown to work well. SMART goals are: 

• Specific. Identify the fitness outcome you want to achieve. Whether that’s increasing how long you can swim without taking a break from 10 minutes to 20 minutes or reducing your typical blood pressure reading from 130/90 to 120/80, be specific about what you’re trying to achieve. 

• Measurable. Determine how you will measure the outcome you’re looking for and get a baseline for where you are now. For example, if you’re looking to improve cardiovascular fitness, check your resting heart rate now and track it regularly over weeks and months to see if it decreases. 

• Achievable. While it might be fun to say “my goal is to become as fit as Katie Ledecky,” this is an amorphous, difficult-to-define goal that’s not achievable. 

• Relevant. Also sometimes listed as realistic, the R means that the goal is meaningful and possible. For example, unless you’re already at an elite level, the chances that you could be as fast as an Olympian is not a realistic or relevant goal for most Masters swimmers. But being fitter or faster than you are today by a specific measure? That is meaningful and achievable with the right training plan.

• Time-bound. Set a timeline to see improvement so you can adjust your approach if you haven’t achieved your goal in time. 

A SMART way to improve fitness with swimming might look like this: 

Instead of making an amorphous goal of wanting to get in shape, make your goal swimming three times per week for the next eight weeks and increasing your continuous swim distance from 500 to 1,000 yards. 

It’s also important to set interim goals to keep you on track for larger aims. For example, if your goal is to swim the English Channel in five years, break that big goal into smaller, achievable goals that mark your progress along the way.

A rough five-year plan might look like: 

• Finishing a 1-mile open water swim at the beginning of your first open water season and building up to finishing a 2- to 3-mile swim within three months

• Swimming a 5-mile event in your second season and building up to a 10K over the next three months

• Completing a 10-mile swim earlier in your third season and building up to a 12- to 15-mile swim by the end of that season

• Starting out with a 15-mile swim at the beginning of your fourth season and building up to a 20-mile swim by the end of that season

• Swimming the 21-mile English Channel in your fifth open water season

Research on athletic goal-setting consistently finds that process-oriented goals that provide interim checkpoints and smaller, achievable goals that build up to the main event can improve adherence and performance. That’s because this approach emphasizes daily actions, shorter-term goal-setting, and incremental achievements rather than distant, hard-to-define outcomes.

Consistency wins the day every time in any sports or fitness realm. The swimmer who works out consistently three times a week for six months will likely see bigger fitness improvements than someone who haphazardly shows up or quits within a few weeks.

The more consistently you show up, the more likely you are to meet all the swimming goals you set for yourself.