Much has been discussed on this topic but i wanted to revisit it after watching the track & field championships and remembering debates about how much pool training time swimmers put in relative to a runner competing in the equivalent event (a 400m runner to 100m swimmer).
What got my attention on this again was a recent article in Men's Fitness about Jeremy Wariner, specifically his training week during mid-season:
M= 200's: 8 x 200's two minutes followed by 40 yd sprints w/20 seconds rest
T= 350m: 2 x 350's followed by 1 x 300, one minute rest then a 100m to simulate the end of the race
W= 450m: 2 x 450's each under 1:00 with 9 minutes rest between each
Th= 90m: Recovery day each run in an "X" pattern
F= 100m: last run of the week is multiple 100m sprints
That's an insanely lower amount of training time than even i put in....Ande & Jazz come to mind.
More of this in an excellent article:
"Elite coaching special - Clyde Hart coach to Michael Johnson and Jeremy Wariner"
Here's are a couple of excerpt:
Clyde believes the principles of training are the same for many events: "I trained Michael Johnson like I trained a four minute miler. A four minute miler was doing a lot of the same things Michael Johnson was - a lot of the same things in training but more of them.
"The longest workout we have ever done - not counting warm up and warm down - would be under 20min, I think we have never worked more than 20min. That's not counting the Fall phase.”
So here's my challenge...I'm going to pick one of the next seasons (either SCM this fall or SCY in the spring) and try and adapt to this regime...anyone else game?
How do you define "quality?" I'm thinking it can't be 100% true since there are many good self-coached masters swimmers.
Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.
Train all the quality you want but if your doing it with improper technique although you may be "fast" and see "improvement" its very doubtful you'll ever know just how could you have been or could be.
Don it actually wasn't all mega yardage in the 70's...at least one coach was doing some insanely different stuff; Sam Freas.
Also I found it very interesting that although I've brought it up several times so many people here still equate "speed" work with "sprinting". What I'm trying to get people to do here is to realize that even if your focus is in the distance events you can and should look at more quality speed work...Grant Hackett being a very good example of how someone who's best event is the 1500m but he can still go 49+ 100m...easy speed is a crucial element for everyone and just baning out max yardage every workout and avoiding speed work (IMO) is a mistake if you want to improve.
How do you define "quality?" I'm thinking it can't be 100% true since there are many good self-coached masters swimmers.
Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.
Train all the quality you want but if your doing it with improper technique although you may be "fast" and see "improvement" its very doubtful you'll ever know just how could you have been or could be.
Don it actually wasn't all mega yardage in the 70's...at least one coach was doing some insanely different stuff; Sam Freas.
Also I found it very interesting that although I've brought it up several times so many people here still equate "speed" work with "sprinting". What I'm trying to get people to do here is to realize that even if your focus is in the distance events you can and should look at more quality speed work...Grant Hackett being a very good example of how someone who's best event is the 1500m but he can still go 49+ 100m...easy speed is a crucial element for everyone and just baning out max yardage every workout and avoiding speed work (IMO) is a mistake if you want to improve.
