Many swimmers think that to improve, all they need to do is get in the pool and swim an ever increasing number of laps. What they fail to understand is that swimming is a technique sport. Unless they incorporate skill development, refinement, and maintenance into their workouts they won't become better swimmers, just better conditioned thrashers. Fitness Swimming is designed to help recreational and competitive swimmers, as well as triathletes, improve both their swimming technique and their conditioning. The book shows how to step by step build a more effective and efficient freestyle stroke using simple drills; then it guides swimmers through a structured conditioning program that emphasizes continued development and refinement of that technique. The heart of Fitness Swimming consists of 60 color-coded workouts that challenge swimmers according to their fitness level and swimming ability. The workouts are distributed across six color zones and get progressively longer and more intense as swimmers move through the zones. The book begins with green workouts, which are the easiest, and ends with red workouts, the hardest. The book not only explains how to set up an effective training regimen using the color-coded workouts, it also provides 16 sample training programs. Swimmers can follow these sample programs as they appear, or they can be used as a starting point for designing individually tailored programs. Fitness Swimming also offers advice on stretching, warming up and cooling down effectively, and choosing the best equipment.