When you are tired, how do you know when you need to continue your daily practices or if you should take a day off? Is your resting heart rate a good guide? This was not an issue when we were younger! :rolleyes:
I can tell when I need to take days off when I just feel horrible. Like when I do a set of 100's and I am going 6 seconds slower than yesterday. I have no real evidence to back this up, but I think when you feel really bad in the water, you need to do more low threshold aerobic work. Do a long main set with really moderate intervals. Don't spend a lot of time on the wall, just swim easier.
overtraining is the single most sportending reason....dont do it!!!!also when you lose the love of what your doing have time out...a fresher person swims faster.
Two thoughts:
Pay attention to signs of mental as well as physical burn out. I fight the former by not turning every work out into a firewall test of my aerobic capacity. Most masters swimmers could benefit from backing off of the interval and working on technique more than they do.
Emmmett Hines book "Fitness Swimming" has an excellent section on putting together a workout plan for a whole season. I most strongly recommend it.
Matt
There are two things that could be happening: "over-reaching" or "over-training". They are quite different.
"Over-reaching" is the result of a single workout, where you have pushed yourself quite hard and in the 24 hours after you may feel tired, light-headed, irritable, raised heart rate, etc, 48 hours after the workout you may get DOMS ( delayed onset muscle soreness ).
However the next time you are in the pool you feel great and are able to continue to improve.
"Overtraining" however, presents the same set of "symptoms", along with problems sleeping, moodiness, problems concentrating but after 24 or 48 hours you still feel the same way or get worse. If you consistently overtrain then you will decrease in performance and possibly get colds more easily.
Most of the newly released books on swimming cover overtraining in depth. Part of the problem is that a lot of the training plans and workouts out there are written for younger swimmers doing 20 + hours a week in the pool and are not that suitable for a 40+ masters swimmer.
Bill Sweetenham in "Championship swimming" recommends that masters swimmers structure their training to have 85% aerobic work, 10% anaerobic work and 5% speed or Lactic work. This is quite different to what is advised for younger swimmers up to their 20's and elite swimmers who are training around 70-80% aerobic, 10-20% anaerobic and 10% speed work.
The basal heart rate is one way of checking your system, however it is affected by hydration levels, tension, caffeine, activity level, etc. A better check is to look at a number of factors such as perceived effort, general mood, and swim performance.
Have a set such as 7 by 200m that you perform regularly. Check your stroke length, average speed and heart rate during the set. Comparing the results from time to time would show overtraining if more strokes or a higher heart rate was needed to make the goal times on the set.
There is a move for coaches to change from "work based training" to "recovery based training". Check out: www.moregold.com.au for detailed info on this.
Well, I know about doing too much speed work. I had to cutdown on the yardage for a few weeks to recover and at one point my stomach was in pain that I layed in bed with a heating pad. And I was very sore and moody.
Listen to your body!
Pain is a sign od something going on. Don't work through too much pain. Take time to get to know your body, and it will tell you whether you can push a little bit more, or if you are pushing past the treshold into an injury or some other more serious problem.
In my case, I most often vary the intensity of my workouts... Swimming close to 3000 daily, but once, or twice a week doing just an EZ-1000. Lickily, in our pool there is at least one or two days a week that are not very busy, so I can take up a lane offf to the side and stretch float, bob and do easy stroke drills while others are doing a full workout.
I don't like getting stiff on the days of, besided, I would *gasp* have to miss a day at the pool! :eek: I wouldn't know what to do with myself! :eek:
I know, I'm hooked. ;)
Waking pulse is a good measure of tiredness, but you have to take it a lot to know what normal is.
For me, tired legs is the easiest symptom to notice. If stairs are difficult, might be overtraining kicking in.
i agree with sparx35. the overtraining is the first cause of sportending. i stop swim cause of overtraning. now, after many years i came back in a pool for swim seriously. i think that the sport is usefull for health and for mind but it will be able the source of phisical trouble or boring
