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?
While I agree that there is a lot of overtraining in swimming, and not enough race-pace training, the kind of training of the T&F athletes doesn't appeal to me personally. I'm just too much of an endorphin addict. Still, I'll look forward to looking at the results of Paul's (hopefully well documented!) experiment. Who knows?
I hesitate to throw out the baby with the bathwater. In the SI article on Phelps, Bowman was taking his swimmers to 70 practices in 24 days before the Olympics. Yardage isn't mentioned, but it is a pretty good bet to be much more than the amount is being discussed here.
Yes, Dara is doing less than half her old training -- in the recent USA-Today article on Dara, she was quoted at 30-35,000 yards a week (this number keeps rising, for some reason, in the articles I've read). That is still far more than the vast majority of masters swimmers and it doesn't include her dryland work. And yet she said that she doesn't think she is training enough to do the 100 fly.
So I have a little bit of a hard time thinking that Phelps and Torres (and many other swimmers) are really so far off the mark.
While I agree that there is a lot of overtraining in swimming, and not enough race-pace training, the kind of training of the T&F athletes doesn't appeal to me personally. I'm just too much of an endorphin addict. Still, I'll look forward to looking at the results of Paul's (hopefully well documented!) experiment. Who knows?
I hesitate to throw out the baby with the bathwater. In the SI article on Phelps, Bowman was taking his swimmers to 70 practices in 24 days before the Olympics. Yardage isn't mentioned, but it is a pretty good bet to be much more than the amount is being discussed here.
Yes, Dara is doing less than half her old training -- in the recent USA-Today article on Dara, she was quoted at 30-35,000 yards a week (this number keeps rising, for some reason, in the articles I've read). That is still far more than the vast majority of masters swimmers and it doesn't include her dryland work. And yet she said that she doesn't think she is training enough to do the 100 fly.
So I have a little bit of a hard time thinking that Phelps and Torres (and many other swimmers) are really so far off the mark.
