Hypoxic Advice/Workouts--Not Your opinion of Hypox Efficacy
Former Member
Discusing Hypoxic sets with a freind, can anyone suggest a good hypoxic set for me.
I'm doing 3500-4000 3x a week and a short sprint workout on the weekend. I will not likely add another day to my schedule.
What's a good starting workout, and also where in my workout should I do this? Do you mix it up e.g. hard interval set then a hypox or hypox and then a pace set.
I am guessing mixing is a good thing but what's a good start point for a set and intervals for this? BR and FR being my stronger strokes.
Geek, we've seen two articles in this thread supporting the point of view that hypoxic training doesn't cause additional adaptations.
What I see here are articles (apparently) supporting the hypothesis that hypoxic training doesn't add anything to the oxygen-utilization capacity that swimmers are already training with other exercises.
What I don't see here is any discussion of how hypoxic training as described early in the thread can, or cannot, serve the other purposes people have identified: (1) reinforcing breath control skills (which are oh-so-important in the last few turns of a 200 when your brain is screaming at you to surface before the flags and breathe already); (2) getting the heart rate up without taxing the muscles, as one might want to do during a taper; (3) focusing on stroke efficiency and highlighting the effects of inefficiency.
I would tend to agree that any breath-control sets I do aren't contributing much or anything to my aerobic fitness, but they definitely help with my ability to stay underwater off turns. And although I work on that skill somewhat with every turn and even more in speed-focused sets, the occasional breath-control set helps me achieve that desperate sense of needing to breathe, and train myself to ignore it just a bit, without the muscular fatigue that speedwork or racing causes. So I don't think those sets are useless, even though they don't very much resemble what I do in a race, because they isolate a component of racing and work on that one component intensively. And seeing as how such sets do encourage stroke efficiency, I don't think that they reinforce bad habits either.
Geek, we've seen two articles in this thread supporting the point of view that hypoxic training doesn't cause additional adaptations.
What I see here are articles (apparently) supporting the hypothesis that hypoxic training doesn't add anything to the oxygen-utilization capacity that swimmers are already training with other exercises.
What I don't see here is any discussion of how hypoxic training as described early in the thread can, or cannot, serve the other purposes people have identified: (1) reinforcing breath control skills (which are oh-so-important in the last few turns of a 200 when your brain is screaming at you to surface before the flags and breathe already); (2) getting the heart rate up without taxing the muscles, as one might want to do during a taper; (3) focusing on stroke efficiency and highlighting the effects of inefficiency.
I would tend to agree that any breath-control sets I do aren't contributing much or anything to my aerobic fitness, but they definitely help with my ability to stay underwater off turns. And although I work on that skill somewhat with every turn and even more in speed-focused sets, the occasional breath-control set helps me achieve that desperate sense of needing to breathe, and train myself to ignore it just a bit, without the muscular fatigue that speedwork or racing causes. So I don't think those sets are useless, even though they don't very much resemble what I do in a race, because they isolate a component of racing and work on that one component intensively. And seeing as how such sets do encourage stroke efficiency, I don't think that they reinforce bad habits either.
