You're welcome Bill. Glad to get more people turned onto USRPT.
It works great alone and works with groups. Cokie Lepinski is coaching a group in the Bay Area using USRPT. It may not work for everyone (although I think it can), but it's the concept that is important, i.e., that you are swimming 98% of your practice at race pace.
We have a small contingent of swimmers who compete ("we" meaning the Upper Valley stingRays, or UV-Rays), but our coach has been incorporating USRPT into our workouts. One difficult thing from a coaching standpoint was the workouts were individualized in terms of time, some people were much faster than others because we had a broad range of ages (33-74). We used tempo trainers extensively and overall I think we saw a lot of success with USRPT ideas. All of us that went to the worlds in Montreal had a lot of success, in that we improved over our previous LCM times.
At least that was true for the most part, my 50 and 100 back were slower than they were a couple of years ago, but those times were for a one day meet in an indoor facility. It was easier to swim faster for one day than it was for six. My 50s went well, though.
As far as USRPT workouts go, I found that I really needed to increase the rest/work ratio. My recovery time is not great, but if I followed the "advice for drop-dead sprinters" and accounted for age, I was able to make progress and spend more time at full speed. The workouts were not often more than 2000 yards total, but if I managed to do 1000 at full speed I got a lot of benefit from it.
You're welcome Bill. Glad to get more people turned onto USRPT.
It works great alone and works with groups. Cokie Lepinski is coaching a group in the Bay Area using USRPT. It may not work for everyone (although I think it can), but it's the concept that is important, i.e., that you are swimming 98% of your practice at race pace.
We have a small contingent of swimmers who compete ("we" meaning the Upper Valley stingRays, or UV-Rays), but our coach has been incorporating USRPT into our workouts. One difficult thing from a coaching standpoint was the workouts were individualized in terms of time, some people were much faster than others because we had a broad range of ages (33-74). We used tempo trainers extensively and overall I think we saw a lot of success with USRPT ideas. All of us that went to the worlds in Montreal had a lot of success, in that we improved over our previous LCM times.
At least that was true for the most part, my 50 and 100 back were slower than they were a couple of years ago, but those times were for a one day meet in an indoor facility. It was easier to swim faster for one day than it was for six. My 50s went well, though.
As far as USRPT workouts go, I found that I really needed to increase the rest/work ratio. My recovery time is not great, but if I followed the "advice for drop-dead sprinters" and accounted for age, I was able to make progress and spend more time at full speed. The workouts were not often more than 2000 yards total, but if I managed to do 1000 at full speed I got a lot of benefit from it.
