I was trying to do a distance set last night but was tired from hitting the gym earlier in the afternoon. I was going 3 seconds/100 slower than I had when recently doing the same set.
For some reason, I can't handle the same workload or recover as well at 49 as I did at 21. :cane:
My question - Does my swimming benefit from struggling through a workout like that? My intensity, effort and heart rate were comparable to when I did the set without weights first and swam much faster.
In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, massive over-work was all the rage in swimming. College teams that had been swimming 6,000 yards a day stepped up to 10,000 yards. I was lucky enough to swim before coaches were swept up by that mass hysteria, but even then, I had several seasons that were just awful because of, in hindsight, overwork - that is, overtraining. In hindsight, I say, because at the time I didn't connect the overwork with the slower times - it's sometimes hard to separate all the causes (excessive weights, or too much time in the library - or maybe it's because in my sophomore year of college I made the mistake of taking a math class, which I only belatedly learned is a leading cause of insanity). But the problems of overtraining came back to haunt me a few years ago when I first started swimming masters. After loading on the yardage for several months, I signed up for a mid-winter swimming meet; I got in the pool to warm up and was surprised that everything hurt, and I was being boiled in lactic acid, even in gentle warm-up sets. Around that time, I happened upon a chart by Doc Counselman (page 101 of a nice book, Swimming Past 50, by Mel Goldstein & Dave Tanner). It suggests that a goal of training is to push into the "fatigue" zone, and allow recovery to improve adaptation - but to avoid pushing harder, into the "failing adaptation" zone. In classic overtraining, rest will help restore the body, but the overtraining causes a loss in performance and, even after you rest and recover from the overtraining, the overtraining itself has taken a toll of performance - in other words, the training created a problem, not a benefit. For this reason, I wonder if it's wise to work past the point of failure - to hit the moment of overtraining that I hit several years ago - with the hope that the taper will fix the problem.
As we age, and as our metabolism slows, recovery takes longer, and overtraining becomes a bigger problem. There are some flaws, I think, in the high-intensity training approaches that some have favored, and some flaws in the critique of "garbage yardage," but particularly for the masters swimmer, those approaches might make more sense than the old and out-of-style approach of overload training ...
In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, massive over-work was all the rage in swimming. College teams that had been swimming 6,000 yards a day stepped up to 10,000 yards. I was lucky enough to swim before coaches were swept up by that mass hysteria, but even then, I had several seasons that were just awful because of, in hindsight, overwork - that is, overtraining. In hindsight, I say, because at the time I didn't connect the overwork with the slower times - it's sometimes hard to separate all the causes (excessive weights, or too much time in the library - or maybe it's because in my sophomore year of college I made the mistake of taking a math class, which I only belatedly learned is a leading cause of insanity). But the problems of overtraining came back to haunt me a few years ago when I first started swimming masters. After loading on the yardage for several months, I signed up for a mid-winter swimming meet; I got in the pool to warm up and was surprised that everything hurt, and I was being boiled in lactic acid, even in gentle warm-up sets. Around that time, I happened upon a chart by Doc Counselman (page 101 of a nice book, Swimming Past 50, by Mel Goldstein & Dave Tanner). It suggests that a goal of training is to push into the "fatigue" zone, and allow recovery to improve adaptation - but to avoid pushing harder, into the "failing adaptation" zone. In classic overtraining, rest will help restore the body, but the overtraining causes a loss in performance and, even after you rest and recover from the overtraining, the overtraining itself has taken a toll of performance - in other words, the training created a problem, not a benefit. For this reason, I wonder if it's wise to work past the point of failure - to hit the moment of overtraining that I hit several years ago - with the hope that the taper will fix the problem.
As we age, and as our metabolism slows, recovery takes longer, and overtraining becomes a bigger problem. There are some flaws, I think, in the high-intensity training approaches that some have favored, and some flaws in the critique of "garbage yardage," but particularly for the masters swimmer, those approaches might make more sense than the old and out-of-style approach of overload training ...
