Hi, my (25M) main concern is that my heart rate is too high while swimming.
For context, I swam through high school, played college water polo, and still play water polo recreationally. Throughout my training history, I’ve never tracked my heart rate and my swimming has always been intervals based. I’m a novice runner, and last year I ran a marathon and used heart rate based training to great success (keeping most of my mileage in the 130-140s HR and occasionally doing pace-based running that pushed up into the 160-170s), so I thought I’d try to apply the same to my swimming.
I started wearing an apple watch and have found, much to my surprise, my HR will rise well into the 170s during a set like 10x100 @ 1’20 (this is a set I can make comfortably reliably and doesn’t feel too hard). I’ve tried low effort continuous swimming holding what feels like an easy zone 2 pace up into the 1’30s and even 1’40s a couple times a week for about a month but have found I cannot get my HR below 150.
I’ll probably just move on and not be bothered by this and keep the heart rate monitor out of the pool, but I’m curious if anyone has found anything similar with their swimming and was able to learn how to swim in zone 2 and, if so, any tips for this?