I've been focusing on stroke work for the past year or so and I'm hitting on a phase I'm hoping others have hit and have answers to.
My 75-85% efforts are when my stroke is best but 1) It seems to fall apart when I really put the pedal to the metal and 2) If I try to slow down to build endurance, the stroke also does not stay together. If I can't maintain stroke mechanics during peak sprints or cardio/muscular endurance sets would that amount to garbage yardage?
This funky middle ground means I get some decent effort in practice, but it seems too short compared to other swimmers workouts. Without building power or endurance using 'the right stroke' I worry that I'm not really making as good of progress as I can.
Thanks in advance.
I find your whole set of recommendations really interesting, Beards247, because, word for word, they are almost exactly what I tend to do on the days that I work out on my own (although I'd probably come in a few seconds behind you - and I don't have the lungs to do the fly kicks off the wall). So sounds like we're in a very similar point of the training spectrum and trying similar approaches. I can't yet say whether this approach is making much difference (I've been doing the kinds of sets you describe 1-2x/week for maybe 2-3 months now), but it does make intuitive sense. Have you started to notice improvements in your ability to keep your stroke together yet with this approach?
On the days that I do team workouts, even though I still try to maintain technique, I pretty quickly end up doing something more along the lines of what knelson said above: "At some point, if you are working hard, you won't be able to maintain your stroke technique. But I think you still need to push yourself to this level and not merely back off when your stroke starts to fall apart. You just need to keep emphasizing good technique when you are able to and hopefully you'll start to increase the speed where the technique drop-off occurs and be able to go farther into your workout before the drop-off occurs."
So it works out that on alternate days I'm "working from both ends" - more emphasis on endurance on team days and on technique on other days. Hopefully the two will meet up at some point.
Very interesting thread - and again, as you continue experimenting, if you find anything else that helps you get to a new level of being able to hang on to good technique during longer swims or sprints, I'll be curious to hear about it. If I hit on anything that seems to make a noticeable difference, I'll pass it along.
I find your whole set of recommendations really interesting, Beards247, because, word for word, they are almost exactly what I tend to do on the days that I work out on my own (although I'd probably come in a few seconds behind you - and I don't have the lungs to do the fly kicks off the wall). So sounds like we're in a very similar point of the training spectrum and trying similar approaches. I can't yet say whether this approach is making much difference (I've been doing the kinds of sets you describe 1-2x/week for maybe 2-3 months now), but it does make intuitive sense. Have you started to notice improvements in your ability to keep your stroke together yet with this approach?
On the days that I do team workouts, even though I still try to maintain technique, I pretty quickly end up doing something more along the lines of what knelson said above: "At some point, if you are working hard, you won't be able to maintain your stroke technique. But I think you still need to push yourself to this level and not merely back off when your stroke starts to fall apart. You just need to keep emphasizing good technique when you are able to and hopefully you'll start to increase the speed where the technique drop-off occurs and be able to go farther into your workout before the drop-off occurs."
So it works out that on alternate days I'm "working from both ends" - more emphasis on endurance on team days and on technique on other days. Hopefully the two will meet up at some point.
Very interesting thread - and again, as you continue experimenting, if you find anything else that helps you get to a new level of being able to hang on to good technique during longer swims or sprints, I'll be curious to hear about it. If I hit on anything that seems to make a noticeable difference, I'll pass it along.
