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've been out of the water for nearly two weeks, and decided I needed to get wet this morning. I decided to try and apply a little of what I've read here. By the time I finished gabbing with the lifeguard I had 50 minutes of my hour left. Here's what I did. Warning: IANAS. While I didn't completely make up the workout on-the-fly (there was no fly, btw), I had really only decided on the warmup and 75s before I got to the pool.
200/100/200 S/K/P warmup
8X75 @ 1:30 - quick odds, cruise evens, descend the odds - went 1:05, 1:04, 1:03, 1:02 on the odds, evens were all 1:07 or 1:08
8X50 @ 1:00/2:00 - 2 X {ez/fast, fast/ez, build, fast} - the two fast 50s were :37, :36, more like :41-:42 for the ez/fast 50s, around :39 for the build 50s
8X25 @ 1:00 - all fast - last was :16, rest were :17
200 ez cool down
At the end I was reminded of the Rodney Dangerfield (or was it Henny Youngman?) joke: "I just flew in from New York. Man are my arms tired!"
As you can tell from the times I am clearly not a sprinter.
I would have rated the 75s as EN2, the fast 50s and all the 25s as EN3. I found the 75s easier than the 25s, certainly physically, probably mentally as well. I guess that's to be expected.
So short workout, but definitely different than my usual workouts.
I've been out of the water for nearly two weeks, and decided I needed to get wet this morning. I decided to try and apply a little of what I've read here. By the time I finished gabbing with the lifeguard I had 50 minutes of my hour left. Here's what I did. Warning: IANAS. While I didn't completely make up the workout on-the-fly (there was no fly, btw), I had really only decided on the warmup and 75s before I got to the pool.
200/100/200 S/K/P warmup
8X75 @ 1:30 - quick odds, cruise evens, descend the odds - went 1:05, 1:04, 1:03, 1:02 on the odds, evens were all 1:07 or 1:08
8X50 @ 1:00/2:00 - 2 X {ez/fast, fast/ez, build, fast} - the two fast 50s were :37, :36, more like :41-:42 for the ez/fast 50s, around :39 for the build 50s
8X25 @ 1:00 - all fast - last was :16, rest were :17
200 ez cool down
At the end I was reminded of the Rodney Dangerfield (or was it Henny Youngman?) joke: "I just flew in from New York. Man are my arms tired!"
As you can tell from the times I am clearly not a sprinter.
I would have rated the 75s as EN2, the fast 50s and all the 25s as EN3. I found the 75s easier than the 25s, certainly physically, probably mentally as well. I guess that's to be expected.
So short workout, but definitely different than my usual workouts.
