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?
Where I think I differ, though, is for folks who really want to train for the 1000 and 1650: for those, I think the training to race philosophy is pretty well matched by high intensity (not all out), low rest sets. For example, if I want to be getting well under 10:00 in my 1000, I'd better be doing lots of repeat 100s on a 1:05 or even 1:00 interval ... doing 10 x 100 on 4:00 all-out, IMHO, is not going to benefit my 1000 time.
I agree with your larger point but disagree with two specifics:
-- I think the 500 and 400 IM benefit some from training such as you describe. (Even the 200s but to a much lesser extent.)
-- I think that 10x100 on 4:00 (a lactate tolerance set) would indeed benefit your 1000 time. It just shouldn't be the only type of training you do, the low-rest stuff is needed (think of these basically as broken race-pace swims). Though my own days of doing more than 2 or 3 10s on 1:00 are long gone...
Where I think I differ, though, is for folks who really want to train for the 1000 and 1650: for those, I think the training to race philosophy is pretty well matched by high intensity (not all out), low rest sets. For example, if I want to be getting well under 10:00 in my 1000, I'd better be doing lots of repeat 100s on a 1:05 or even 1:00 interval ... doing 10 x 100 on 4:00 all-out, IMHO, is not going to benefit my 1000 time.
I agree with your larger point but disagree with two specifics:
-- I think the 500 and 400 IM benefit some from training such as you describe. (Even the 200s but to a much lesser extent.)
-- I think that 10x100 on 4:00 (a lactate tolerance set) would indeed benefit your 1000 time. It just shouldn't be the only type of training you do, the low-rest stuff is needed (think of these basically as broken race-pace swims). Though my own days of doing more than 2 or 3 10s on 1:00 are long gone...
