Has anyone used any of the strength training plans from this book by David Salo? I had planned to follow this starting in January, but when it came right down to it, the plans seemed nebulous and possibly a bit out of date compared to other plans I had available (non swim specific). So I went with another option for the time being.
Any thoughts, opinions?
Very few people are interested in working hard consistently to get faster. So that's why my universal advice is: if you are tired, but you are not actually injured and your strength numbers are not decreasing, then suck it up and keep going.
Why would you use a strength metric for overtraining instead of one that is more directly related to swim performance, such as performance on test sets or in-season meets? Or the ability to recover between hard efforts?
Yes lifting will in the short term depress swim performance (and vice versa), this is to be expected. But if you goal is to swim fast and lifting -- or any other form of cross-training -- overly compromises the ability to train hard in the water, then it is not helping and quite possibly hurting your training.
The trick of course it so be able to recognize when the training is "overly" compromised. It takes some experience, possibly involving crossing that line a time or two. You are saying that masters swimmers are too quick to cry "uncle." Perhaps so, but I think if you can't swim more than 700 yards that you aren't being "wimpy" for scaling back a bit.
Very few people are interested in working hard consistently to get faster. So that's why my universal advice is: if you are tired, but you are not actually injured and your strength numbers are not decreasing, then suck it up and keep going.
Why would you use a strength metric for overtraining instead of one that is more directly related to swim performance, such as performance on test sets or in-season meets? Or the ability to recover between hard efforts?
Yes lifting will in the short term depress swim performance (and vice versa), this is to be expected. But if you goal is to swim fast and lifting -- or any other form of cross-training -- overly compromises the ability to train hard in the water, then it is not helping and quite possibly hurting your training.
The trick of course it so be able to recognize when the training is "overly" compromised. It takes some experience, possibly involving crossing that line a time or two. You are saying that masters swimmers are too quick to cry "uncle." Perhaps so, but I think if you can't swim more than 700 yards that you aren't being "wimpy" for scaling back a bit.
