I read somewhere that Jason Lezak only swims 4,000 yds/meters a day. Has anyone else heard this? I don't see how an athlete of his caliber can get by on such little yardage. It seems like if he bumped it up some he could be faster than he already is. I swim more than that and I'm nowhere near as fast as him lol.
I remember the outcry, but I don't remember who the key players were at the time. My recollection is reading a story in Swimming World about a coach who thought about 3,000 per workout was all that was needed and went on to describe how he trained his swimmers in this manner. Was this Salo or someone else?
Yes it was David Salo. In the March 1989 edition of Swimming World on page 55 and 56 he has an article that he wrote called "Training Tenets Challenged" where he describes how a senior level swimmer training 3000 yards a day for 8 weeks had progressive improvements in every freestyle event from 50 to 800 meters and had lifetime bests in every event except the 800. He also talked about the comeback of Rowdy Gaines swimming in the 1988 Olympic Trials. He said that after a long layoff that Rowdy tried to make a comeback in 6 months and got pretty close to making the Olympic team. In fact, so close that his :50.2 time was only .04 from his Gold medal winning time in 1984 and got 7th place missing the team by one place. The point he was trying to make is that he did maybe one sixth of the training he did in the past for the 100 Free and pretty much had the same results.
These articles started about November 1987 and if you are a premium member over at Swimming World you can access them on there website. This one I was referring to had Janet Evans on the cover so I found that pretty ironic with this type of training.
I remember the outcry, but I don't remember who the key players were at the time. My recollection is reading a story in Swimming World about a coach who thought about 3,000 per workout was all that was needed and went on to describe how he trained his swimmers in this manner. Was this Salo or someone else?
Yes it was David Salo. In the March 1989 edition of Swimming World on page 55 and 56 he has an article that he wrote called "Training Tenets Challenged" where he describes how a senior level swimmer training 3000 yards a day for 8 weeks had progressive improvements in every freestyle event from 50 to 800 meters and had lifetime bests in every event except the 800. He also talked about the comeback of Rowdy Gaines swimming in the 1988 Olympic Trials. He said that after a long layoff that Rowdy tried to make a comeback in 6 months and got pretty close to making the Olympic team. In fact, so close that his :50.2 time was only .04 from his Gold medal winning time in 1984 and got 7th place missing the team by one place. The point he was trying to make is that he did maybe one sixth of the training he did in the past for the 100 Free and pretty much had the same results.
These articles started about November 1987 and if you are a premium member over at Swimming World you can access them on there website. This one I was referring to had Janet Evans on the cover so I found that pretty ironic with this type of training.
