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 a sprinter, so swimming distance sets with my club team does not bother me. I think we keep the garbage yardage to a minimum, but obviously sprinters don't need 3,000 yard main sets.
I would guess that your average masters program has fewer coaches than club/college counterparts, making it difficult to create specialized workouts every day and pay attention to everyone. A swimmer has an easy gauge of improvement if they can hold a faster interval in a set after a month of hard training. They don't need a coach watching them for that. In a set of sprint 50's, unless they have a coach giving them splits, it can be very difficult to tell. Even then, you could be talking improvements in the tenths of a second, which leaves room for timing discrepancies. From that standpoint, it is more challenging to assist sprinters in practice.
Another issue is stroke technique. I think stroke correction is far easier when swimming at a moderate pace as opposed to sprinting. The more yards someone swims with good technique, the greater the likelihood that it will become natural for them. And if the swimmer is trying to unlearn a problem from years of training, it's going to take that much longer to fix the issue. If you already have perfect technique, then by all means, sprint away!
For the most part, I agree with everything that has been said in this thread so far.
I'm not a sprinter, so swimming distance sets with my club team does not bother me. I think we keep the garbage yardage to a minimum, but obviously sprinters don't need 3,000 yard main sets.
I would guess that your average masters program has fewer coaches than club/college counterparts, making it difficult to create specialized workouts every day and pay attention to everyone. A swimmer has an easy gauge of improvement if they can hold a faster interval in a set after a month of hard training. They don't need a coach watching them for that. In a set of sprint 50's, unless they have a coach giving them splits, it can be very difficult to tell. Even then, you could be talking improvements in the tenths of a second, which leaves room for timing discrepancies. From that standpoint, it is more challenging to assist sprinters in practice.
Another issue is stroke technique. I think stroke correction is far easier when swimming at a moderate pace as opposed to sprinting. The more yards someone swims with good technique, the greater the likelihood that it will become natural for them. And if the swimmer is trying to unlearn a problem from years of training, it's going to take that much longer to fix the issue. If you already have perfect technique, then by all means, sprint away!
For the most part, I agree with everything that has been said in this thread so far.
