Consider this thought experiment: after taking a year off, you spend a long base phase doing nothing -- absolutely nothing -- except easy distance. I am not comfortable with easy distance here. I hate adaptation to *easy*. It implies that nothing never really gets overloaded. It may suggest laziness, mental laziness. Low level endurance can hurt when you book enough mileage to create the overload. It just takes more time.
Anyway, if one decides to extend an exclusively aerobic base development period for up to a year, given that the volume is sufficient to elicit improvement to aerobic capacity, we can easily assume that the swimmer will at least be able to reach a speed corresponding to something that may look like a 400m pace without dying early in the anaerobic capacity phase that follows.
We can also assume that the recovery period between each anaerobic capacity bout attempt will be very fast. And the joins will likely be better adapted as a result of a very conservative progressive overload. O2 deficit will go to the roof, thus creating strong discomfort, and a very sever acidosis will probably kick in early into the last 25, forcing you to finish the rep at an incredibly slow pace. Butterflyers may give up. The week after, it will already feel much better. Enzymes responsible for glycolysis metabolism improve very rapidly (And they detrain very rapidly too).
If this aerobic development phase involves lots of threshold paced swim, done on a stroke count diet, then same muscle fibers involved in sprinting will get developed. Network of capillaries will be built, within Slow Twitch and TypeIIa, and rarely get destroyed by severe acidosis. Efficiency of Enzymes responsible for anaerobic metabolism *always* get trained anyway, and at threshold pace, they work relatively hard. In the end, if it's true that mostly anaerobic work still gets the aerobic metabolism going, the opposite is also true.
Consider this thought experiment: after taking a year off, you spend a long base phase doing nothing -- absolutely nothing -- except easy distance. I am not comfortable with easy distance here. I hate adaptation to *easy*. It implies that nothing never really gets overloaded. It may suggest laziness, mental laziness. Low level endurance can hurt when you book enough mileage to create the overload. It just takes more time.
Anyway, if one decides to extend an exclusively aerobic base development period for up to a year, given that the volume is sufficient to elicit improvement to aerobic capacity, we can easily assume that the swimmer will at least be able to reach a speed corresponding to something that may look like a 400m pace without dying early in the anaerobic capacity phase that follows.
We can also assume that the recovery period between each anaerobic capacity bout attempt will be very fast. And the joins will likely be better adapted as a result of a very conservative progressive overload. O2 deficit will go to the roof, thus creating strong discomfort, and a very sever acidosis will probably kick in early into the last 25, forcing you to finish the rep at an incredibly slow pace. Butterflyers may give up. The week after, it will already feel much better. Enzymes responsible for glycolysis metabolism improve very rapidly (And they detrain very rapidly too).
If this aerobic development phase involves lots of threshold paced swim, done on a stroke count diet, then same muscle fibers involved in sprinting will get developed. Network of capillaries will be built, within Slow Twitch and TypeIIa, and rarely get destroyed by severe acidosis. Efficiency of Enzymes responsible for anaerobic metabolism *always* get trained anyway, and at threshold pace, they work relatively hard. In the end, if it's true that mostly anaerobic work still gets the aerobic metabolism going, the opposite is also true.
