Quantifying training

There is a common belief among swimmers and swim coaches that more muscular people need longer tapers. For a similar reason, women are often supposed to need a shorter taper than men. The belief might not be correct, of course, but if it is then it implies that the time constants are related to muscle mass. True. But older swimmers are supposed to need longer tapers, too, right? So it may be individual, but it must not purely be muscle mass. Could the primary benefit of a long taper be the full repair of all muscle damage? The amount of damage (muscle size indicator) or the rate of repair (age indicator) would then define the ideal length of the taper.

Just as a point of information, there is commercially available testing that can measure the force of an individual during free swimming in any unit of measure desirable. (Velocity Meter/Video Telemetry) This telemetry is also combined with underwater video that is synchronized and can be played back immediately at poolside. (Peak force per stroke, average force per stroke, power in watts for any swimming speed, and specifically for each stroke) Because the telemetry is synchronized with underwater video, the location in the stroke cycle where maximal force occurs and the amount of propulsive force generated can be identified. In addition and all at the same time, the velocity of the swimmer is also measured. The speed of the telemetry is 1000 data points a second because the fluctuations during free swimming in all of these parameters is very small so high speed telemetry is required to reveal them. If you would like to see examples of this telemetry, visit the TeamTermin Sports Performance web site under the Velocity Meter tab.

For me, energy would increase based on the distance of the repeats and on the total distance of fly in a workout. This doesn't make sense. If you are traveling the same distance in the same time with the same stroke, why would energy be different? Fly is just causing you to go into more anaerobic debt the longer you swim it. With 50s you have time to catch up that with 100s you don't. So with 100s you get more pain for the same amount of energy as twice as many 50s. What a deal!

"Sudden break" tapers are an interesting topic. I have certainly heard of a number of cases -- as I'm certain you have -- where illness or injury forced someone essentially to adopt this strategy, and the result is usually not the disaster that the person feared. In some cases the person does better than in previous conventional tapers (or, at least, no worse). But here is a situation where the models may be dangerously simplified. It isn't just about fatigue vs fitness: stay out of the water too long and you lose your "feel" (muscle memory, whatever) and your stroke efficiency may deteriorate. It is always a good thing not to fall too much in love with any model.:)

I can spend some quality time in a squat rack and prove to myself that the more weight I lift... I think more quality time might be needed, I've seen your results. Nerd.

Without any more context, I'd interpret this as saying that recovery during taper may be analogous to restocking glycogen during carb loading. Not that the timescales are similar. You guys may have been mislead by studies conducted among untrained subjects maybe ? Here, you may want to read this www.pponline.co.uk/.../recovery-training-too-much-hard-training-can-devastate-your-muscles-and-implode-your-immune-system-510 They suggest a key recovery time frame of 36hrs (we see this quite often). 36-72. 36 partial recovery but good enough to book another quality workout. 72h being the maximal recovery time one could expect which covers pretty most physiological aspects (glycogen restore, muscles tissue damage, nervous system fatigue, hydratation etc etc etc....) If muscle tissue damage was taking that much time to recover from, body builders would have a very hard time putting together a 5day/week training schedule I believe. I.e., overtraining followed by rest allows recovery to higher than previous levels of fitness (which sounds to me like the standard training effect), just like starvation followed by carb loading allows a temporary over-filling of glycogen levels. But the time scale of the former is ~2 weeks, and the latter is ~2 days. Overreaching (not overtraining which is a completely different condition) can fade out to allow for higher than previous levels of fitness within 36-72 hours. Otherwise, it's the whole periodisation principle that would fall apart. I don't assume from this that "muscle tissue damage recovery time goes parallel to time to replenish glycogen levels" (emphasis mine). you're definitely allowed to. Wow, that's a whole different argument. I don't know about you, but I definitely feel fatigue long after my blood lactate concentrations return to normal. Taken in this context, in exercise physiology, fatigue simply refers to the phenomenon that forces you to slow down as Lactate Level increase. It's not that much of a different argument. One (Lactate/glycogen) is used as a proxy to track or fair guess the others (which are far too complex to be tracked or monitored). Or so is the way I understand Maglischo's statement. Which implies that your 4-day "sudden break" would be more effective than a 2-week gradual taper. I agree that would not be a good taper strategy. But I think so because I don't believe fatigue has faded in 4 days. If you take a look at one of the studies referred to by the article, you'll see that their protocol involved testing recovery after 24h, then after 5 days. After 5 days, there are no trace whatsoever of muscle damage. Tissue (assessing through biopsies) is back to baseline. If they had tested after 4 days, they would have probably ended up with the same result. I'm curious why you don't like a full-stop taper strategy? I'm a coach. Therefore people do count on me for achieving their goals (sometimes dreams). Drop tapers have shown to far less predictable than progressive tapers. How should I put this. There's enough gambling in a season. If you were paying me to create a plan for you, the least I could do is to avoid gambling during your taper. This instability in the results obtained during drop tapers is certainly in part due to both adverse impact of such a drastic measure on cardiac output (which fades away very rapidly) as well as efficiency of the Enzymes (which also detrain very rapidly) responsible for getting you to swim as fast as you'd which, no matter what these Enzymes are.

"Sudden break" tapers are an interesting topic. I have certainly heard of a number of cases -- as I'm certain you have -- where illness or injury forced someone essentially to adopt this strategy, and the result is usually not the disaster that the person feared. In some cases the person does better than in previous conventional tapers (or, at least, no worse). In total agreement. You see? Theory says that we should plan. Planning for a full season involves knowing before the very first workout, what any specific week will be made of in term of volume, distribution and activities. Before we reach week#1, I can tell you what your week #36 is supposed to be made of. However, things never go as planned. Forces you to gamble. For instance, extend the duration of a certain mesocycle because the testing did not give the expected results. Modifying this and that because of injuries etc... Like you mentioned, you sometimes end up prior the taper phase in situations that may call for different taper types. Also, scientific literature do report some cases where a 7day taper involving 3 or 4 consecutive days off would give better results (than a progressive tapers), but these are exceptions though. stay out of the water too long and you lose your "feel" (muscle memory, whatever) and your stroke efficiency may deteriorate. It is always a good thing not to fall too much in love with any model.:) It is extremely interesting here. We often think about the lats and triceps and pectorals and quads as the main muscle groups involved in swimming. It's not the case though. These are the muscle groups mainly involved in propulsion. There are several other muscles groups responsible for maintaining proper technique, often involving very small but highly important muscles which will get detrained much more rapidly than larger muscle masses. For instance, some rotator's cuff muscles involved in keeping high elbow during the catch phase (fly, free) may respond very badly to 3-4 days off during a taper, and may impair your ability to keep your elbow high. As you mention, it's all very complex.

If muscle tissue damage was taking that much time to recover from, body builders would have a very hard time putting together a 5day/week training schedule I believe. They do, this is why they work under split schedules. One of the forum ex-bodybuilders only trained a body part once every 20 days at his peak lifting weight. The more muscle damage the more time to recover. I can spend some quality time in a squat rack and prove to myself that the more weight I lift, the more damage I do, the longer it takes to recover. I can also simulate the compounding effect of muscle damage by lifting a weight that is well below my max, but lifted everyday results in failure after several days without break. There is not a whole lot of theory behind my statement but a fair amount of empirical evidence. Based on this, I don't actually care what studies have found if real world experiments are finding differently. Curls at 80% of max weight until failure results in glycogen depletion. This is completely different than "lifting to failure" caused by muscle damage.

I think more quality time might be needed, I've seen your results. Nerd. You saw the results of some ridiculous amount of time on a stationary bike. I have not lifted heavy since I decided to go ice skating on my driveway. Where do you think I lost 27lbs? I have skinny little stick legs now. I never had anything but skinny little stick arms. :(

I can spend some quality time in a squat rack and prove to myself that the more weight I lift, the more damage I do, the longer it takes to recover. Again Q, I believe that this confusion may be caused by some study results conducted among untrained subjects. The muscle damage (and doms that follow) experimented untrained subjects committing to a weight resistance training can almost be considered as an injury. It can sometimes take weeks before it completely fade out. That, I agree (see anecdote below) If you search for most available data on trained subjects though, you'll end up with a different opinion. Take this one for example www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.../12663352 They did not even bother testing passed this famous 72hr time frame. Because after this period (I'm not inventing all this, be reassured), most believe that most negative training effect disappeared. Anecdote: Once I was coaching a master squad. That day, a master asked me about dry land exercises, so I mention well pushup, situps etc until I get disrupted by one master who was challenging pretty much all I was saying. He'd state that push ups and sit ups were very effective and that he could perform dozens of them. I therefore conducted a dryland session during which I used my 5 position pushup set. Position 1, very close to the ground, but the belly doesn't touch it. Position 5, arms extended. The set involves me calling positions. Subjects need to hold the position until the next call. So you'd go Position3, then 1 (keep it for 10sec) then 2, then 5, then 1 again. 2 weeks after, the same master was asking me if he should go to hospital since he would still feel the DOMS. So Q, I'm in a good position to know that muscle tissue damage can take a lot of time to heal, but not under normal training circumstances with carefully trained subjects. For that, we rather use the 36-72hr principle, which is often used in Maglischo's book anyway (so it should sound familiar to you). This principle is referred to in the pponline article, and you'll often see it used in study protocols too. If you look at the graph on page 392 of your book, you'll see that from a base level of 160mmol/kg muscle mass prior the set, glyco levels were up to only 120mmol after 48hour of recovery, which tends to indicate that there again, the magical 72hours were required to go back to pre-training levels. Not pulling this out of nowhere, it's documented this way pretty much everywhere. Do not get mislead by those study results on untrained subjects though. When you get to the taper (that's what you've been arguing about after all), you're assumed to be a trained subject hopefully.