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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JH but you do a lot else. So you think if one did your interesteing routines as part of their routine it would have the ame efect. Or do you think it's the absence of other swimming e.g. slower paced distance etc that makes it work?
I'm sure Ande will disagree, but I really don't think the absence of other swimming is the important thing. I can take it or leave it. I'm training for 50s this year, so I mostly leave it. There's only a certain amount of training stress I can handle, especially my shoulders and elbows. Better to use all of that training capital on sprinting and strength training.
There's a lot that goes into race preparation, and I don't claim to understand it all. There's flexibility, muscle strength, anaerobic capacity, aerobic capacity, lactate buffering, and on and on. All of these things take time to develop, and they require sometimes overlapping and sometimes contradictory methods.
On top of everything, however, is the amazingly fast adaptation that we have for learning motor skills. If you want to swim a race for a certain time at a certain effort level, you better make it a priority to swim at that effort level for that amount of time in practice.
JH but you do a lot else. So you think if one did your interesteing routines as part of their routine it would have the ame efect. Or do you think it's the absence of other swimming e.g. slower paced distance etc that makes it work?
I'm sure Ande will disagree, but I really don't think the absence of other swimming is the important thing. I can take it or leave it. I'm training for 50s this year, so I mostly leave it. There's only a certain amount of training stress I can handle, especially my shoulders and elbows. Better to use all of that training capital on sprinting and strength training.
There's a lot that goes into race preparation, and I don't claim to understand it all. There's flexibility, muscle strength, anaerobic capacity, aerobic capacity, lactate buffering, and on and on. All of these things take time to develop, and they require sometimes overlapping and sometimes contradictory methods.
On top of everything, however, is the amazingly fast adaptation that we have for learning motor skills. If you want to swim a race for a certain time at a certain effort level, you better make it a priority to swim at that effort level for that amount of time in practice.
