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?
Very interesting, Paul. I can tell you how many times I've done that over the past season because that number is exactly zero.
All I can say is that its something I believe very strongly about. I will use our group of the Tri-Mesa guys on our team as an example...when they started with us 18 months ago all they wanted was long freestyle/pull sets and no matter how much rest they had none of them could go faster than about 1:40. Now all of them hold 1:20's on 1:30 base 100's and swim in the 1:10 range...all but two went under 60 minutes for their Ironman swims.
Now to be honest they all do a T30, T60, 10 x 500's and assorted other long swims monthly so don't think they are training like sprinters!
Very interesting, Paul. I can tell you how many times I've done that over the past season because that number is exactly zero.
All I can say is that its something I believe very strongly about. I will use our group of the Tri-Mesa guys on our team as an example...when they started with us 18 months ago all they wanted was long freestyle/pull sets and no matter how much rest they had none of them could go faster than about 1:40. Now all of them hold 1:20's on 1:30 base 100's and swim in the 1:10 range...all but two went under 60 minutes for their Ironman swims.
Now to be honest they all do a T30, T60, 10 x 500's and assorted other long swims monthly so don't think they are training like sprinters!