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?
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Wow I go to lunch and this thread sprints to almost a one pager already :) *EDIT* by the time i typed my reply it's 1.5 pages.
Absolutely agree. I create my workouts with the 50/100 free in mind. They're so far from what some would call a typical hard masters workout that many people would be turned off by them. So far they're working out great for me... I am 6 tenths off my college best 50 time at 60lbs over college race weight at only 6000m per week. I attribute it to the training I do now and how much different it is even compared to what I did in college. I am very critical of turn work and starts and everything else that happens outside the flags (any time saved here is free). Most masters workouts I've seen only seem to work on things that happen between the flags. Its evidenced by the fact that you can watch people dog turns and flop starts in their races.
It's all about how you swim rather than how far you swim. I think a lot of masters workouts either lose sight of that, or don't really explore that for fear of losing interest. I could see many joe-typical participants want to leave a team if workouts got as intense as they need to be for sprinters.
Great thread though. Hoping some day I can set a record of some kind besides fastest fat man :)
Wow I go to lunch and this thread sprints to almost a one pager already :) *EDIT* by the time i typed my reply it's 1.5 pages.
Absolutely agree. I create my workouts with the 50/100 free in mind. They're so far from what some would call a typical hard masters workout that many people would be turned off by them. So far they're working out great for me... I am 6 tenths off my college best 50 time at 60lbs over college race weight at only 6000m per week. I attribute it to the training I do now and how much different it is even compared to what I did in college. I am very critical of turn work and starts and everything else that happens outside the flags (any time saved here is free). Most masters workouts I've seen only seem to work on things that happen between the flags. Its evidenced by the fact that you can watch people dog turns and flop starts in their races.
It's all about how you swim rather than how far you swim. I think a lot of masters workouts either lose sight of that, or don't really explore that for fear of losing interest. I could see many joe-typical participants want to leave a team if workouts got as intense as they need to be for sprinters.
Great thread though. Hoping some day I can set a record of some kind besides fastest fat man :)
