Fortress' impressive three world record performance over the weekend made me think of this topic. Obviously the things she's doing are working well for the events she likes to swim. She concentrates on SDKs, fast swimming with lots of rest and drylands to aid in explosiveness. Long aerobic sets just aren't a part of her training regime, from what I've seen.
Almost every organized training group I've swum with, on the other hand, focuses on long aerobic sets, short rest, not a whole lot of fast stuff, etc. Basically the polar opposite of how Fortress trains. In my opinion this probably works pretty well for those who swim longer events, but really does very little for sprinters. The sprint events are almost always the most popular events at meets, so why do people choose to train aerobically? I think there are a number of factors at play. There's the much maligned triathletes. There's those who don't compete and "just want to get their yardage in." There's a historical precedent of lots of yardage being the way to go.
So what do you all think? How does you or your team train? I know lots of regular bloggers here DO train differently than my perception of the norm. Examples include Ande, Chris S. and Speedo. Are too many masters teams stuck in a training regime that is not at all what many of their swimmers need to get faster?
I'm not going to dismiss mega-aerobic training since when I trained that way in college, I was faster than I am now. But I don't LIKE training that way, and I don't do distance free anymore, so now I do as little aerobic training as I can get away with. The 400 IM is my second-best event, so some aerobic training is required. But I spend much more time on anaerobic butterfly, focusing on technique, race strategy, and stroke counts. I think for a 200 flyer, that is a better approach than training almost all freestyle and then swimming the 200 fly in meets and hoping for the best. I remember diving in and swimming fly, and it would feel weird since I hadn't done any of it since the last meet... :afraid:
I'm not going to dismiss mega-aerobic training since when I trained that way in college, I was faster than I am now. But I don't LIKE training that way, and I don't do distance free anymore, so now I do as little aerobic training as I can get away with. The 400 IM is my second-best event, so some aerobic training is required. But I spend much more time on anaerobic butterfly, focusing on technique, race strategy, and stroke counts. I think for a 200 flyer, that is a better approach than training almost all freestyle and then swimming the 200 fly in meets and hoping for the best. I remember diving in and swimming fly, and it would feel weird since I hadn't done any of it since the last meet... :afraid:
