Coaches and Sprinting

The coaches I have had never focused on sprints. That is one of the reasons I chose to swim with a kids team last year, to learn how to sprint again. My first year back to swimming with a bad back after 3 weeks in the water I went a 31.77 in the 50 Free. 3 years later, with a better back and I still could not break :30 for a 50 free. After 6 months with Rick Benner I learned to sprint and lead off the relay at Nationals with a 27.83. Yes it was more expensive to swim with the kids but it was well worth it. This year I had the option of going back to my old masters coach and knowing I would lose my ablity to sprint or to coach myself, I chose to coach myself. I want to maintain my ability to sprint as well as do distance.

I have heard that some Masters coaches are more interested in general fitness than speed.What is your experience? Do you feel that your coach prepares you to swim 50s and 100s?Is sprinting a regular part of practice at least once a week and if so do you do it as a main set or as an add on at the end?Do you do lactic acid sets?How much do you work on starts and turns? My coach gets at fitness (:)) through a variety of things, including sprints. There is no one stroke or one set = fitness. You do have to tax the body somewhat for fitness to occur.

Jazzy, :rofl: Thanks. I haven't smiled in a long time. That was good for a belly laugh.

My wife's not a master's coach, but she teaches adults at varying skill levels. For the ones who can already swim fairly well, she writes a sprint workout and a distance workout and lets them pick, but also tries to get them to mix it up a bit. I could be wrong, but I believe that the coached master's sessions in my neck of the woods are focused on fitness more than racing (which is fine as most master swimmers are in it for the fitness), so I wind up doing my own thing. This works out ok as I'm more of a sprinter than a distance person. :applaud::bouncing::banana:

Over the past 25 years, I have been a member of 4 large USMS clubs. UC San Diego USF Davis NOVA I've trained with many other smaller teams in traveling as well. All 4 of the large teams and most of those I have visited, run a practice schedule that seems a variation of: Monday - Mid-distance Free Tues/Thur - Stroke/IM Wednesday - Big freestyle distance Friday - Fast/Sprint/Fins Saturday - Intensive or distance Sunday - Recovery or technique practice If your club does not have some kind of regular practice rotation, and you feel you are missing something in particular... "Go talk to your coach" (thanks Ben Shepard!) "Asking" (thanks Ande - Swim Faster Faster) U.S. Masters Swimming Discussion Forums - View Single Post - Ande's Swimming Tips: Swimming Faster Faster If you're a sprinter and you have not read Ande, Paul, or Erik's advice here on the forum, then do that next. Or checked periodically Ande or Fortress' blogs where sprinting fast is of the utmost importance. Ande? He is the MASTER of, "Assigned XXX, Did XXX" Fortress? She is Bad A** fast - and super smart. Interesting variations of dynamic sprint training - weight lifting - dryland - swim sets - and hands down, the best discussions/comments among masters swimmers out there! A former coach of mine, used to get insulted when I did not do everything as assigned when he coached. Luckily, he wasn't on deck very often. But after venturing out to look for coaching not offered within my own club, I found insight and experience worth trying in my own practices - right here. It can be tough to have the confidence to add or change up the training everyone else in the pool is doing - like herded sheep. Sometimes, all we need is the confidence to try something new. Follow our intuition. Ande gives some good advice on how to accomplish this in practice quite stealthly... Swimming changed a lot for me in the last year... just about the time I found these forum discussions. (A treasure chest of coaches) As a coach on deck and a swimmer in the pool, I have found that there are many masters swimmers who are incredibly knowledgeable and generous with their advice. Just because I'm the coach on deck does not mean I am the end all. My swimmer and I are a working team. As a coach, I've tried to be open to contributions and suggestions from the pool. I have learned more from real swimmers about swimming than anyone else. Some things DO change. Swimming is one of them. Very grateful for that and all the good (sometimes sarcastically offered) advice from swimmers.

Master coaches I have come across want everyone to be a four stroke swimmer. Breaststroke and backstroke are not for me. They spend very little time on sprint work. They spend most of their time doing finger drag drills, fin swimming, paddle work, pull bouy swimming, one arm swimming, stroke counting, and bilateral breathing. No time is spent on racing dives, turns or sprint swimming.

The masters coach is in a tough position. You have to please a wide variety of grown-ups who know what they want out of a workout. Sprinting a 50 or 100 is pretty specialized thing to do, compared to general fitness/muscle tone goals or the long-distance requirements of triathaletes (which I think a lot of masters swimmers are). I feel for a masters coach; you cant please eveyone all of the time...

The majority of our training is endurance based, but we do sprint pretty often. Sometimes as I'm coming to the end of a season I'll break off from the group a bit and do some sharpening work, i.e., sprinting. That's my taper. I spend about three weeks working on speed and recovery.

My team (masters, mostly college students) is very recreation and fitness focused. I think a lot of the swimmers are there just to get some cardio in the big blue wet thing.

I coach in a really small pool, with a huge range of swimmers crammed into two and a half lanes. Distance is hard, because people get run over, but I still do it with them. We also do a lot of stroke. Sprints are hard because not everyone wants to race, and people want to get those yards in. However, I occasionally do sprint sets, but it is hard when for half the lane swimmers get tons of rest, and for the other half of the lane, they are kind of cheated out of really getting to sprint. We only have three practices a week, an hour for each (the limits of our Y). It's hard to find the balance. I'm working on it. One of our previous coaches, much more experienced than I am, regularly would have us do a sprint at the end of practice for time, and regularly had us do what for me was continuous threshold training. Since I am not a sprinter, that helped me with my pace for distance. What is a good amount of rest for a sprint of 100? Of 50? Of 200 (based on my group: most swimmers sprint a 100 free on 1:20 or 1:35, but a few sprint on 1:05 or 1:15? The 1:20, 1:15, and 1:05 sprinters are all in the same lane. The 1:25, 1:30, 1:35 sprinters are all in the next lane. The 1:45, 1:50 sprinters are in the next lane.)? We have an exuberantly enthusiastic team that likes to go to meets, just not superfast swimmers except for a very few. 2:30 for the 100 for the fastest group? 2:45 for the next fastest? 3:00 for the last group? Still learning; appreciate feedback.