When your work doesn't pay off

I'm a life-long athlete, but fairly new to competitive swimming, having started swimming competitively for the first time in my life only a couple of years ago, but one thing I've noticed is that fitness and conditioning, while important, are secondary to good technique. To get faster sometimes one has to take a step back from training hard and focus on training smart. How often during the 5-6 swim workouts per week are you focusing on improving your technique? Do you mostly get in and swim hard or do you take the time to improve your stroke? Are you cognizant of the inefficiencies in your stroke while you're working out and mentally focus on removing or fixing them? Good technique will pay much higher dividends than will being in good shape.

To answer your question, one only needs to look at your routine. 5-6 workouts, 2 weight sessions and 2 crosstraining sessions per week. Your body is not getting enough rest. take a day or two off each week. All of that exercise, while invigorating, tears down muscle mass and creates fatigue, of which both can be relieved by rest. More exercise may seem like that answer, but there are two sides to every coin. The more you practice and train, the more your body needs rest and time to absorb the benefits.

My $.02. What events are you training for? Your team's practices might not be conducive to training for certain events. For example, the practices I swim are woefully inadequate for training for the 200 fly and 400 IM, so I have to train for those events on my own, while I can more or less train for the other events I swim during the team practices. Quality over quantity. Like you, I made a ton of improvement swimming up until college, back when I was doing doubles and 12,000+ yards a day. Now, 2.5 years back in the water as a masters swimmer, I'm lucky to get in an hour and 3,500-4,000 yards a day, 3-5 times a week. I'm close to my old age group best times in backstroke and sprint fly, and that's because I'm focusing much more on quality and technique than garbage yardage. In addition, if you're training for the 200 back, for example, but all your team practices are free oriented, those are going to be much lower quality practices than a back focused practice. My team's Saturday practices are usually distance free practices. When I go, I usually down a lane and swim backstroke instead of free since I don't compete in free events--that way, I can get some benefit out of a practice that would otherwise be useless for me outside of general conditioning. Technique, technique, technique! You could be putting in 12,000 yards a day, but if you've got cruddy technique, that's pure garbage yardage. A 3,000 yard practice with good technique is going to be better than a 5,000 yard practice with bad technique. For me, I don't have the endurance that I used to. Sure, I can go knock out a good 200 back, but I don't have the limitless endurance that I did when I was 17. I've had to focus on ironing out the flaws in my technique as I've gotten older in order to maintain the same (well, nearly the same) speed that I used to have. I used to be able to muscle through events as a teenager with pretty shoddy technique without any problems. Nowadays, not so much. The biggest mental shift for me as a masters swimmer has been the focus on exemplary technique, targeted practices, and focus on high quality over high yardage.

you can Swim FASTER FASTER Please provide us with more details What's your goal? What are your times? then & now what kind of sets are you doing? Consider beginning a blog what suit did you wear in your races? height? Weight?

Another question I have is have you really rested for a meet in masters? If the answer is no, then you should. Perhaps your body has never been ready to race fast. Swimming when fully rested can make a HUGE difference.

LOts of advise for you. Try more rat b4 BIG meets. we all are not kids any more.

I usually do take the day off prior to a race, but I don't tapper after every single one of them because sometimes meets are too close together Of course not, but you should at least be picking a competition periodically that you taper for (Worlds, for example). Build your training plan with that meet as the end goal. And rest sufficiently for that meet. A lot of masters taper for several weeks prior to a big meet. LOts of advise for you. Try more rat b4 BIG meets. I personally wouldn't endorse eating rats, but to each his own I guess...:bolt:

WOW!! Thanks you guys for all your advise! In response to some of your questions, I am training for 200 I.M and 200 *** and some long distance freestyle events (400 and 800). I do try to focus on my technique and my coach constantly gives me pointers and drills to correct it in all strokes, especially because of my I.M. event, but that is definitely an area that I need to improve and try to be mindful about it. In practice, we do a mix of drills, plus fast intervals, distance, kick, etc. and at times I modify the set to myself for say practice more breastroke or things like that. In terms of rest, I've actually cut-down on my workouts, and i make sure i have a break between one and the other whereas I used to have them more back to back, and always take at least Sundays off to rest. I guess my frustration comes that when I started back in Masters, I improved quite a bit and got to a point where i was getting faster but i was overloading myself and ended up over trained and with physical exhaustion. I took time off to recover and then i decided to try again but smarter, that's why i got the trainer to set me up with a program with weights that would help me in the pool, and the nutritionist, etc. I run as cross-training because I remember when i was younger, that was a huge part of the dryland we were doing and it seemed to help me aerobically, but I HATE it! lol so if you guys say that it does nothing for my swimming I will not complain about stopping it lol I will definitely try to get more on board with the technique and try to get more rest in between. Thanks guys you are awesome :):)

I used to swim competitively when i was younger up until i was 17, and back then i was improving a lot, very fast. I am extremely frustrated, as all i want to do is to become a faster Masters swimmer, and be the best that i can be. Of course you were improving a lot, very fast, in your teens. You were growing. But your arms and legs stopped getting longer eight or ten years ago. You might be able to put on muscle mass through training, but you're not going to pack it on the way you did as a teen; and anyway, bodybuilder-style muscle mass does not seem to correlate much with swimming speed. Technique does. The most likely reason that people who "seldom go to practice" are "quite fast" compared to you is that their technique is superior. Their hips are at the surface. Their elbows are above their wrists throughout their pulls. Their hands are in line with their forearms, and their forearms point straight down rather than sweeping under their bodies. Their faces look directly to the side when they breathe, and only their top eyes come out of the water. Their torsos stay straight when they pull, rather than wiggling from side to side. I am faster at 46 than I was at 30. For instance, I can go about 5 seconds faster now in the 500, and about 20 seconds faster in the 1500/1650, than I could then. My resting heart rate isn't any lower, although my maximum heart rate probably is. My body composition hasn't changed significantly. The best explanation for my improvement is that my technique is better.

What events are you training for and how are you training for those events?