Swimmers and coaches often set workout targets like 90% effort or 95% effort for practice swims. I've always found these directives to be less than useful. What is "90% effort"? I've taken to setting time targets of race time plus a certain percentage. For example one could specify the set:
5x(100 free @ race + 15%)/2:00.
That is, five 100 free swims on the 2:00 (120 sec.) interval with a target time of race time + 15%. (This would be a painful lactate production set in my estimation.)
Based on my own experience, I constructed this chart giving qualitative descriptions of the effort level associated with a practice swim from a push to achieve race time plus a percentage:
7283
A few notes:
This would correspond to the effort level of the first swim in a group. Obviously even race +25% will constitute a very hard effort after you have done a lot of them.
Generally, it appears to be easier to swim at race pace + x% for longer swims.
It is easier to swim near race pace for backstroke than freestyle. I suspect that this is simply due to the fact that a freestyle dive start gives more of an advantage over a push than a backstroke race start.
I pose the following two questions to the forum community:
1) How do these effort levels compare with your experience? I'd love to see similar charts for other swimmers.
2) How much time do you spend in practice at each effort level? This will certainly depend on the time of the season. Early in the season I expect one might do a lot of "blue" swims up to some yellow, whereas later in the season one needs to spend a lot more time in yellow with frequent excursions into in the "red zone".
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Not to hijack but Eaglerest what would a typical workout be for you as a sprinter? I'm just getting back into swimming after 27 years so I'm always looking for workout ideas. Example of what I did last night 16x25fr @ 15-16 secs with 1 minute rest. So I was close to 90% each rep. This was after some kicking drills, br drills and warmup fr/br
Good question.
I think there are 2 sides to this coin - 1) effort and 2) time-targets. They are mutually exclusive. Your charts appear to be purely focused on time-targets, not effort. Times that you achieve in training can vary wildly due to numerous circumstances (fatigue, recovery, diet, sleep, previous session training, etc). Perceived effort should always be the same, so if you're working at 90% effort, although the times may vary day to day, the effort is the same. Perhaps a better indicator is to monitor your heart rate at the end of a training swim, and equate that with what you perceive the effort to be?
The chart shows colour shading for targets that are impossible. There are very few circumstances where 100% effort cannot be achieved during a training session. Time targets may not be possible, but MAX is MAX, so again perhaps time-targets are not the best indicator of effort.
The example you reference is a lactate tolerance set, rather than lactate production. You will certainly produce lactate during that set but there isn't enough rest/recovery to remove it. An example of a lactate production set is 6 x 100, first 25 MAX, 75 recovery on 3 mins. Produce lactate/remove lactate, repeat.
The levels that others swim @ can only really be compared if you understand what they are training for.... I'm a drop-dead sprinter and a session is either recovery or lactate production with recovery. So my perceived effort is either MAX or 40-50% aerobic work. I don't do hardly any tolerance or threshold work.
100/200 sprinters will incorporate more tolerance and threshold work, where the perceived effort can vary from 70%- MAX.
I know very little on training for distance events, but those that I train with seem to work everything hard, not MAX of course, but probably 70%+ effort on every set.
Not to hijack but Eaglerest what would a typical workout be for you as a sprinter? I'm just getting back into swimming after 27 years so I'm always looking for workout ideas. Example of what I did last night 16x25fr @ 15-16 secs with 1 minute rest. So I was close to 90% each rep. This was after some kicking drills, br drills and warmup fr/br
Good question.
I think there are 2 sides to this coin - 1) effort and 2) time-targets. They are mutually exclusive. Your charts appear to be purely focused on time-targets, not effort. Times that you achieve in training can vary wildly due to numerous circumstances (fatigue, recovery, diet, sleep, previous session training, etc). Perceived effort should always be the same, so if you're working at 90% effort, although the times may vary day to day, the effort is the same. Perhaps a better indicator is to monitor your heart rate at the end of a training swim, and equate that with what you perceive the effort to be?
The chart shows colour shading for targets that are impossible. There are very few circumstances where 100% effort cannot be achieved during a training session. Time targets may not be possible, but MAX is MAX, so again perhaps time-targets are not the best indicator of effort.
The example you reference is a lactate tolerance set, rather than lactate production. You will certainly produce lactate during that set but there isn't enough rest/recovery to remove it. An example of a lactate production set is 6 x 100, first 25 MAX, 75 recovery on 3 mins. Produce lactate/remove lactate, repeat.
The levels that others swim @ can only really be compared if you understand what they are training for.... I'm a drop-dead sprinter and a session is either recovery or lactate production with recovery. So my perceived effort is either MAX or 40-50% aerobic work. I don't do hardly any tolerance or threshold work.
100/200 sprinters will incorporate more tolerance and threshold work, where the perceived effort can vary from 70%- MAX.
I know very little on training for distance events, but those that I train with seem to work everything hard, not MAX of course, but probably 70%+ effort on every set.
