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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I don't like training alone. The trade off is that you have to be willing to modify the sets to achieve your individual training goals. Fortunately we have separate "Fun and Fitness" lanes at Nitro for those who don't compete. For those who do, the coaches incorporate IM, distance, stroke, sprinting, and race pace work throughout the week. One of our coaches assigns the intervals by lane on his days with a specific goal in mind for his sets. Garbage yardage hasn't been an issue; the real challenge has been trying to determine how much time to allocate for each of the areas we need to work on when we only have six 75 minute training sessions per week. You are left with about 2000 yards for the main set after factoring in warm up, a transition set, and warm down.
I don't like training alone. The trade off is that you have to be willing to modify the sets to achieve your individual training goals. Fortunately we have separate "Fun and Fitness" lanes at Nitro for those who don't compete. For those who do, the coaches incorporate IM, distance, stroke, sprinting, and race pace work throughout the week. One of our coaches assigns the intervals by lane on his days with a specific goal in mind for his sets. Garbage yardage hasn't been an issue; the real challenge has been trying to determine how much time to allocate for each of the areas we need to work on when we only have six 75 minute training sessions per week. You are left with about 2000 yards for the main set after factoring in warm up, a transition set, and warm down.
