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?
Most teams just don't have workouts for sprinters because they're catering to too many other different specialities -- tris, OW, mid-D, D, etc. -- who want more yardage and less rest.
At meets aren't 50s and 100s the most popular? If so, that suggests that more workouts should be true Fortress-style sprint workouts.
"More yardage and less rest" probably applies to most people, if for no other reason than most peoples' available training time is limited. Workouts are 75 minutes where I swim for now (two, maybe three times per week). I can make one lap swim, which is only one our long. I think even if I was a sprinter I'd feel like I wasn't making the most of my pool time if I wasn't moving.
Finally, I think there are limited opportunities to divide the lanes on many teams. When I swam with Evanston Masters last year, the pool was generally pretty crowded. It wasn't unusual to have five swimmers per lane, and seven wasn't unheard of. Lanes were always divided up by speed into three groups: slow, medium, fast (say, based on what sort of interval you'd swim 100 free repeats), never by specialty. Unless you have lots and lots of available pool time I suspect it's hard to divide up a large team any other way. That means that most dedicated sprinters and distance swimmers probably look elsewhere for pool time. I was very jealous of the available practice times at St. Pete Masters when we were down there on vacation last month. 5x/wk early morning *and* late afternoon, plus Sunday. I've never had 11 practices per week to choose from.
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Most teams just don't have workouts for sprinters because they're catering to too many other different specialities -- tris, OW, mid-D, D, etc. -- who want more yardage and less rest.
At meets aren't 50s and 100s the most popular? If so, that suggests that more workouts should be true Fortress-style sprint workouts.
"More yardage and less rest" probably applies to most people, if for no other reason than most peoples' available training time is limited. Workouts are 75 minutes where I swim for now (two, maybe three times per week). I can make one lap swim, which is only one our long. I think even if I was a sprinter I'd feel like I wasn't making the most of my pool time if I wasn't moving.
Finally, I think there are limited opportunities to divide the lanes on many teams. When I swam with Evanston Masters last year, the pool was generally pretty crowded. It wasn't unusual to have five swimmers per lane, and seven wasn't unheard of. Lanes were always divided up by speed into three groups: slow, medium, fast (say, based on what sort of interval you'd swim 100 free repeats), never by specialty. Unless you have lots and lots of available pool time I suspect it's hard to divide up a large team any other way. That means that most dedicated sprinters and distance swimmers probably look elsewhere for pool time. I was very jealous of the available practice times at St. Pete Masters when we were down there on vacation last month. 5x/wk early morning *and* late afternoon, plus Sunday. I've never had 11 practices per week to choose from.
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