I wonder if anyone can help me. Thank you in advance!
My goal is to improve my 400 meter freestyle. My time right now is 5:45. I am almost 44 years old.
Coming off six weeks of doing only long, slow swims (2-3 miles) at 125 HR or lower, I performed a 3000 meter freestyle at maximum in an effort to discover my lactate threshold. My time was 47:29.
Right afterwards my HR was 164, so I estimate it was probably around 170 during the actual swim. Average pace was as follows:
1:35 per 100
3:10 per 200
6:20 per 400
My first 400 was, to my surprise, a 6:02. So you can see I got slower later on.
Is this a reasonable approximation if my lactate threshold?
Should I start by training below this pace, say at 140 HR, then build to eventually holding 400 meter pace?
Thank you for any advice you care to give. God bless!
Skeletal muscles undergo all kinds of adaptations from athletic training. One of the most important of these is increasing the number of mitochondria within each muscle cell. Mitochondria are the so-called "power houses" where oxygen and fuel are processed to fuel our swimming or other athletic pursuit.
Long hard distance training can help increase mitochondria, but researchers have recently learned that much shorter, extremely intense bursts of activity can accomplish the same thing. Check out this video of a "Wingate sprint":
www.youtube.com/watch
Skeletal muscles undergo all kinds of adaptations from athletic training. One of the most important of these is increasing the number of mitochondria within each muscle cell. Mitochondria are the so-called "power houses" where oxygen and fuel are processed to fuel our swimming or other athletic pursuit.
Long hard distance training can help increase mitochondria, but researchers have recently learned that much shorter, extremely intense bursts of activity can accomplish the same thing. Check out this video of a "Wingate sprint":
www.youtube.com/watch
