First thing that strikes me related to your back events, is the relatively slow times over your 50s, which suggests a lack in term of pure speed power. Previous analysis done with Allen Stark data revealed an SDI of 1.2 between his 50breast and 100 ***, which is a little more typical (normal).
I found some data that makes me feel better. Most of these are the same as mine to within about 1%.
Ryosuke Irie
50/100 LCM back - 1.065
50/200 LCM back - 1.086
100/200 LCM back - 1.107
100/200 SCM back - 1.099
Laure Manaudou
100/200 LCM back - 1.090
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.
I guess they're following in the footsteps of MDs who experiment on themselves. Doesn't surprise me. The whole thing started by coincidence, around a beer in a hotel bar, when Prof Banister was attending to a conference (or giving a conference I am not sure) on a completely different topic. A few folks around a beer, arguing on some principles and stuff...
Few years back, I tried to get in touch with Prof Banister. Unfortunately, he had severe health issues so I got referred to one of his assistant back then. We envision documenting the concept, both historical, theoretical and practical perspectives. Work in progress.....
Based on Lindsay and SolarEnergy's encouragement, I did some more reading on respiration to see if my beliefs that training anaerobic at equivalent energy levels would work the aerobic system just as hard.
I think I was wrong, anaerobic interval training alone will not tax the aerobic system optimally for a swimmer.
No math, promise. Here is some of what I learned.
Energy production is localized. For example, the muscles in your arms can become more efficient, while your legs do not. The adaptions caused by training happen on a per cell level, and if a cell isn't being worked, it has no reason to adjust. This is obvious every time one of us who is in shape goes and does something new, and is quickly winded and sore the next day. The "but I thought I was in shape" phenomenon.
If a muscle is getting any anaerobic energy, then it is at 100% aerobic capacity. If a muscle has oxygen, it is going to use it.
Sugar is converted to anaerobic energy much less efficiently than aerobic. If you drive a car in aerobic mode and get 20 miles to the gallon, anaerobic mode is about 1 mile to the gallon.
Lactate is a waste product to anaerobic energy production.
Lactate is recycled after oxygen becomes available. The recycling process requires energy that is provided aerobically.
Lactate recycling takes about 3x as much energy as it provided originally, so there is a lot of post exercise aerobic work being done.
Although a lot of aerobic energy is needed to convert lactate back to sugar, this process isn't done in your swimming muscles, and does not benefit your aerobic swimming at all.
Taxing the lactate recycling system (that happens in the liver) will help you recover faster as your liver adapts to processing larger volumes of lactate. The aerobic benefits caused by anaerobic energy production are really next event benefits, not this event benefits.
In another thread, Rich Abrahams mentioned that Michael Mann told him to do a controlled 30 minute swim at an aerobic level. I didn't understand why at the time but I think I understand now. Interval training gives the aerobic system in the swimming muscles a break. An occasional long slow swim (I think Rich said he did it weekly) would encourage adaption of the aerobic system specifically in the swimming muscles. If Rich or Michael wants to explain the real justification, I would love to hear it.
Here are my opinions on training right now
Long uninterrupted swims are probably the best for improving aerobic conditioning where it matters.
The majority of training time should be devoted to anaerobic work.
I don't see any benefit to swimming intervals at aerobic pace over swimming aerobic pace continually.
I don't see what beneficial adaption would occur when extreme over distance training (>x4 target event).
Garrett McCaffrey interviewed Jon Urbanchek for the Morning Swim Show at the Meet of Champions in Mission Viejo last week. Urbanchek has always been a pretty forward thinking coach in terms of using science to assist in training his swimmers. He's been thinking in terms of energy systems for a long time and was an early adopter of using blood lactate testing. He doesn't get into anything real technical in this interview, but it's always great to hear him speak. He always has something interesting to say.
blip.tv/.../hI8Ogeb7dgI
Few interesting quotes
"Everybody know what everybody is doing, but how you implement it....."(referring to the X factor)
"Not everything about the 'old' is bad, and not everything about the 'new' is good"
"The energy system is not... clear. It's like a rainbow. There's no line between the rainbow colors"
"You shouldn't wait until your last meet to test to see if you get it right". (there, he's talking about his rewarding system which is aimed at giving each swimmer a mission at every meet, even low key ones).
Ok, 200 posts later, I think it is time for more experimentation and less postulation. I realized that I'm not done just yet.
Just had a very exciting discussion in private.
Here's my proposal. All non free style specialists, that have an interest at really improving the 200, consider yourself as sprint/mid distance swimmers. Coach on the clip is kind of positive on that. 200/400, pretty much the same animals.
With Master swimmers, a 200 breaststroke is taking what... 2:45 maybe? 2:50? Well that is a full 50sec at max o2 peak (max hr). Requires a solid aerobic capacity development program. Not even talking about 400/300/200/100/50 like proposed for the 100 specialists, but rather about real vo2max sets, with all the progressive overload that comes before during the Base build up.
It's not the distance that places an event in this or that category, it's the time it'll take you to complete the event.
Now, no more physiology hard core talk, unless someone wants to continue challenging the concepts that were brought forward so far. If anyone wants to try and propose aerobic capacity development sets, be my guess.
Can somebody change the topic to "Training article - For nerds!"?
No, the title is correct, the article is for everyone. The discussion that has ensued is for nerds.
Glad to see you stop by ;)
