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?
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I've been back in the water after a six year hiatus and have been training kind of like the track workouts Paul described. I'm convinced I was overtrained in high school and college and could have swum faster.
I lift hard a couple of times a week, but only swim about 2,500 in 4-5 swim workouts a week. I do zero 'garbage' yardage. After a short warm-up, I do lots of dolphin kicking with fins specifically to work on SDK off the walls and strengthen my core. I do stroke drills trying to get the hang of EVF. Then I do some sprints and warm down.
With just a few days rest, my times in the 50 LCM free and fly would have been 3rd and 4th in the 40-44 age group last year, so I'm pretty happy with my progress. Now, I haven't even tried racing 100s LCM yet. They might be beyond terrible. But I think training like this is fun. I also train on my own, so I just wouldn't tolerate 10X200 or anything like that. I'd simply get bored and get out before finishing such a set.
I've been back in the water after a six year hiatus and have been training kind of like the track workouts Paul described. I'm convinced I was overtrained in high school and college and could have swum faster.
I lift hard a couple of times a week, but only swim about 2,500 in 4-5 swim workouts a week. I do zero 'garbage' yardage. After a short warm-up, I do lots of dolphin kicking with fins specifically to work on SDK off the walls and strengthen my core. I do stroke drills trying to get the hang of EVF. Then I do some sprints and warm down.
With just a few days rest, my times in the 50 LCM free and fly would have been 3rd and 4th in the 40-44 age group last year, so I'm pretty happy with my progress. Now, I haven't even tried racing 100s LCM yet. They might be beyond terrible. But I think training like this is fun. I also train on my own, so I just wouldn't tolerate 10X200 or anything like that. I'd simply get bored and get out before finishing such a set.
