This is excerpted by permission from the most recent CrossFit Journal. I had to leave parts of the workouts out just for space reasons but my favorite is the "Seals" Sets! 
Swimming - CrossFit Style
- Tim Morrison
Amanda Beard, Jason Lezak, Aaron Peirsol, Lenny Krayzelburg. If you’re remotely connected to the sport of swimming you recognize these as the names of Olympic champions. What you might not know is that in a swim training culture that usually has swimmers (in events averaging two minutes) raining like marathon runners, these athletes were trained in a manner that is pure CrossFit.
The mastermind behind the training center in Irvine, CA, where this training takes place is Dr. David Salo, who was named men’s head coach at the World Championship meet in Montreal, Canada, that just concluded on July 31. For a guy who was almost blackballed from the community for espousing his radical training ideas twenty years ago, attaining this position today is quite a feat!
Back in those days, when Salo was a graduate student in exercise physiology at USC, his instincts as a swimmer and student told him that swimmers of all distances could swim faster on a fraction of the conventional training volume if the intensity was high enough. He scored a writing gig with Swimming World magazine and began presenting his theories and supporting evidence in its pages.
At a time when American swimming performance was falling severely behind that of countries that were training smarter, Salo, his ideas, and the magazine generated a strong backlash from the old coaching guard, who measured work in terms of total distance (rather than in terms of power, the primary requirement of swim events). “He’s diluting the work ethic of the young,” other coaches warned. The head of U.S. Swimming at the time was crusading for programs with more mileage to get the nations’ competitive swimmers back on track.
Needless to say, his column writing was short-lived. His only recourse was to walk the walk and produce performance. He took over the Irvine Novaquatics Club in the late 1980s and began training his swimmers at literally one quarter of conventional training volume (3500 total yards per workout) but with a variety of relentless high intensity work in the pool and on the deck. Although the training volume was much
lower than that of most other teams, athletes in his sessions typically produced four times the other swimmers’ power output.
He began placing an increasing number of swimmers on Olympic teams, beginning with Amanda Beard in 1992, and his teams repeatedly won the U.S. Nationals. By 2005, there was no choice but to name him head coach of the world championships.
TRAINING
Salo’s training revolves around a concept CrossFitters will recognize: work per unit of time. Power.
Load for swimmers is measured predominantly by speed. The faster the swim, the greater the resistance encountered and the forces exerted. Specifically, each athlete’s projected race pace (PRP) is manipulated in a variety of ways to increase overload.
Distances for sets rarely go over 150 meters and duration rarely exceeds twenty minutes. Sound familiar?
A wide variety of training modes and stimuli are used: multiple strokes for all swimmers regardless of specialization; upper- and lower-body overload; on-deck circuitwork done in conjunction with swimming; a variety of resistance apparatus such fins, paddles, weight belts, stretch cords, pulling tubes and belts with chutes, and weighted diving bricks. All these provide the maximal overload and intensity possible in the water.
I know most CrossFitters are not training for competitive swim events and don’t track goal times or paces, so what I’d like to do here is to present a few workouts in WOD fashion to give examples of high-intensity swim sessions that bring some CrossFit sensibilities to the swimming pool. Enjoy!
Perhaps a swim workout on your rest days?
ASSUMPTIONS
• You can swim! A passable technique of
freestyle, breast stroke (or side stroke),
backstroke, and perhaps butterfly provide
variety of muscle use.
• You are in a 25-yard or 25-meter
pool.
• You have a kickboard, fins, paddles, and buoy. A pulling belt with a chute and a weight belt are also great.
THE WORKOUTS
These are benchmarks and the form the core of each workout. You will warm up and do any other drills or training you like in addition to this. Unless otherwise specified, in the workouts described below, “pull” means using the arms only, with paddles on the hands and a buoy between the legs; "kick” means using the legs only, with the arms on a kickboard; and “swim” means using the full-body stroke. Calisthenics are done on the pool deck. A suggested warm-up is 3 consecutively faster rounds of 150 meters swim, 100 meters kick, 100 meters pull.
A. Exercise-Swim Circuits
A-1
For time:
50 squats + 500 meters kick
50 push-ups + 500 meters pull
25 burpees + 500 meters swim
A-2
8 rounds for time:
15 squat jumps
25 meters swim underwater from dive
30-second vertical kick with hands out of
water (“eggbeaters”)
25 meters sprint kick
A-3
8 rounds for time:
20 deep-end “muscle-ups” (start from full
extension underwater with knees bent
ninety degrees)
75 meters pull
50 bent-over stretch cord pulls (or 30
push-ups)
75 meters pull
A-4
10 continuous rounds of:
1:00 vertical kick with weight held
overhead (use fins if needed)
1:00 tread water with arms only, legs
locked straight and stillA-5
Partner Pulls: The first swimmer pulls the
second swimmer, who kicks; 1-2 breaths
max for each; switch positions every 25
meters:
24 x 25 meters; 10 seconds rest between
rounds
C. Freestyle Swim Sets
C-1
10 x 100 meters speed-play with 30
seconds rest between 100s; hold initial
25-meter speed throughout:
1. Sprint the first 25 meters
2. Sprint the second 25 meters
3. Sprint the third 25 meters
4. Sprint the fourth 25 meters
5. Sprint the first and third 25 meters
6. Sprint the second and fourth 25
meters
7. Sprint the first and second 25 meters
8. Sprint the second and third 25 meters
9. Sprint the third and fourth 25 meters
10. Sprint 100 meters
C-2
Continuous. Decreasing numbers are
moderate swim; 50s are timed sprints.
Keep 50-meter times as close as possible
to the first one.
400-50-350-50-300-50-250-50-200-50-
150-50-100-50-50-50
C-3
One minute rest between 100s:
10 x 100 meters swim
Record average 100-meter time.
C-4
Swim the first set of 50s at 90% effort; try
to hold that pace throughout the series:
5 x 50 meters, with 10 seconds rest
between sets
4 x 100 meters, with 20 seconds rest
between sets
3 x 150 meters, with 30 seconds rest
between sets
2 x 200 meters, with 40 seconds rest
between sets
1 x 250 meters
C-5
Classic 1500 set (for you triathletes out
there):
10 x 150 swim at projected race pace
Do every 7-10 days or so. Begin with 40
seconds rest between 150s; whenever
you can hold all sets at your projected
race pace, reduce the rest periods by 5
seconds.
Tim Morrison was a swim coach from the club to the university level for many years in Cincinnati and Seattle. He has run his own “SwimFit” business, (an overall fitness program with swimming as a core mode) in Chicago for the past ten years.