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".
Quantifying effort by percentage may work in elite ranks, where the coach is infinitely familiar with each swimmer's capabilities. But in more garden variety masters practices, I think it makes more sense to use descriptive adjectives whose meanings shift a bit as the set grinds on.
If the coach is giving send offs, he already knows enough about the swimmers in the lanes to use the other methods we have tossed out. The coach needs to lump the people together into lanes, you don't necessarily need to know that Sally's critical pace is 1:32 and Bruce's is 1:28, you just need to know that those folks as a group hover around 1:30. Then you have the interval.
If you're using 100 times, same thing; you don't need to know their time exactly but need to know which groups to put together in your lanes.
But at the same token shouldn't the coach know or at least be able to look up what the speed of the swimmers are, if he can't how does he know what he is doing is working?
Not to pick on your or your coach, this happens all the time and I often wonder this very question. If there are never test sets, what makes the coach think that what he is doing is working.
Quantifying effort by percentage may work in elite ranks, where the coach is infinitely familiar with each swimmer's capabilities. But in more garden variety masters practices, I think it makes more sense to use descriptive adjectives whose meanings shift a bit as the set grinds on.
If the coach is giving send offs, he already knows enough about the swimmers in the lanes to use the other methods we have tossed out. The coach needs to lump the people together into lanes, you don't necessarily need to know that Sally's critical pace is 1:32 and Bruce's is 1:28, you just need to know that those folks as a group hover around 1:30. Then you have the interval.
If you're using 100 times, same thing; you don't need to know their time exactly but need to know which groups to put together in your lanes.
But at the same token shouldn't the coach know or at least be able to look up what the speed of the swimmers are, if he can't how does he know what he is doing is working?
Not to pick on your or your coach, this happens all the time and I often wonder this very question. If there are never test sets, what makes the coach think that what he is doing is working.
