Ultra Short Training At Race Pace

Sound familiar? You’re feeling some swagger these days. Putting in the big yardage. Topping it off with high intensity too. And looking to put an edge on that blade. So you dial up one of those ultra-short sets. You know, the 30 x 25 at 100 race pace on 20 seconds rest. And … HOLY MOLY! ... it eats your backside for lunch! Spits you out too. This cannot be right, you say. I’m a stud. It has to be the set. Yea, it’s a bad set. Simply bathes you in lactic acid. Strictly for masochists. Forget it. I am too old for a beat down like that. First thing: No one‒I mean no one‒jumping into the teeth of an ultra-short set comes away without a seriously masticated ego. Why? Because nothing‒I mean nothing‒can duplicate the demands of ultra short. Except ultra short itself. That’s how specific it is. Or how un-specific everything else is. Real life cases of this, and the science too, are cited in Rushall B. S. (2013). Hypotheses about the specificity of physical conditioning in swimming: it is a lot more specific than commonly believed. Swimming Science Journal – Swimming Science Bulletin 42. So, what to do? Ø You’re not too old. Scratch that. Ø You’ve got to ease into it, with longer rests and slower paces at first. This is laid out by Dr. Rushall in Adapting to the USRPT format. Swimming Science Bulletin 45b and in Step by step USRPT planning and decision-making processes. Swimming Science Bulletin 47. Ø You’ve got to recite, over and over, again and again, “ultra-short rests are not too short … ultra-short rests are not too short …” Common sense says otherwise, I know. But the science says that resting too little or too long is what swamps the muscles in lactic acid. Between the too-little and the too-long is the ultra short sweet spot where speed-endurance evolves—where anaerobic, acid-making muscle becomes oxygen-loving muscle. This is explained nicely in Aerobic Training is not Enough. Swimming Science Bulletin 42c. Second thing: In sport, it’s recovery time—the time needed to bounce back from the last workout—that takes the biggest hit from aging. Ultra short can help to counter this unhappy process. The sets are a bear, sure, but they are self-limiting. You get to bail out whenever you can’t keep the pace. No survival swimming here. You get plenty tired, but you never get wasted by acid build up or wacked out by depleted energy stores. Recovery time is quicker, thus preserving—as aging takes its toll—the ability to chalk up an ample load of quality workouts. Then there’s the problem of shrinking reserves of time and energy. Married, kids, real job? You know what I mean. Ultra short can help there too—by excluding everything, like weight lifting, that is extraneous to the direct pursuit of fast racing. This is explained fully in Fatigue in swimming: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Swimming Science Bulletin 46a. And, despite all the interest in the training format, the heart and soul of ultra short is the perfection of stroke technique. Every rest interval is devoted to focused attention on skill. Ultra short is nothing if not efficient. What about recovery within a set? Mightn’t the march of time have an effect on that too? Ultra-short rest intervals, derived from studies on college kids, are 15 seconds for sets of 12.5s or 25s and 20 seconds for sets of 50s, 75s, or 100s. See The mechanisms of ultra-short training: the translation of Christensen’s thinking into swimming terms and its place in training programs. Swimming Science Bulletin 45. Masters swimmers can individualize these rests so that their repeats begin at the same state of recovery as younger swimmers. Here’s how. The science says that breathing, not pulse rate, is the best measure of recovery—and Dr. Rushall says that each repeat should begin before the breathing rate slows by more than 5%. This means that the sensation of breathlessness can be used as a send off signal. You push off, not when you’ve caught your breath, but at the very first easing of air hunger. When I—a 67 year-old, drop-dead sprinter—do this on a fly set of 12.5s at 50 race pace, the rest intervals begin at 8 seconds and level off at 18 seconds before neural fatigue shuts down the set. A word about 50s though. Ultra short chiefly trains the type of endurance that is fueled by inhaled oxygen. Now, at the elite level, 50s are no-breathers—and ultra short has to be modified for these hypoxic dashes (see Swimming Science Bulletin 47). But at the masters level, your race times inevitably slow, and breath holding ceases to be an option. Your 50s become more aerobic, such that fewer changes are required in the ultra-short format. (At age 44, I could no-breathe a 50 fly in 23 seconds. Now, at 27 seconds, the need for air is overwhelming.)

Sound familiar? You’re feeling some swagger these days. Putting in the big yardage. Topping it off with high intensity too. And looking to put an edge on that blade. So you dial up one of those ultra-short sets. You know, the 30 x 25 at 100 race pace on 20 seconds rest. And … HOLY MOLY! ... it eats your backside for lunch! Spits you out too. This cannot be right, you say. I’m a stud. It has to be the set. Yea, it’s a bad set. Simply bathes you in lactic acid. Strictly for masochists. Forget it. I am too old for a beat down like that. First thing: No one‒I mean no one‒jumping into the teeth of an ultra-short set comes away without a seriously masticated ego. Why? Because nothing‒I mean nothing‒can duplicate the demands of ultra short. Except ultra short itself. That’s how specific it is. Or how un-specific everything else is. Real life cases of this, and the science too, are cited in Rushall B. S. (2013). Hypotheses about the specificity of physical conditioning in swimming: it is a lot more specific than commonly believed. Swimming Science Journal – Swimming Science Bulletin 42. So, what to do? Ø You’re not too old. Scratch that. Ø You’ve got to ease into it, with longer rests and slower paces at first. This is laid out by Dr. Rushall in Adapting to the USRPT format. Swimming Science Bulletin 45b and in Step by step USRPT planning and decision-making processes. Swimming Science Bulletin 47. Ø You’ve got to recite, over and over, again and again, “ultra-short rests are not too short … ultra-short rests are not too short …” Common sense says otherwise, I know. But the science says that resting too little or too long is what swamps the muscles in lactic acid. Between the too-little and the too-long is the ultra short sweet spot where speed-endurance evolves—where anaerobic, acid-making muscle becomes oxygen-loving muscle. This is explained nicely in Aerobic Training is not Enough. Swimming Science Bulletin 42c. Second thing: In sport, it’s recovery time—the time needed to bounce back from the last workout—that takes the biggest hit from aging. Ultra short can help to counter this unhappy process. The sets are a bear, sure, but they are self-limiting. You get to bail out whenever you can’t keep the pace. No survival swimming here. You get plenty tired, but you never get wasted by acid build up or wacked out by depleted energy stores. Recovery time is quicker, thus preserving—as aging takes its toll—the ability to chalk up an ample load of quality workouts. Then there’s the problem of shrinking reserves of time and energy. Married, kids, real job? You know what I mean. Ultra short can help there too—by excluding everything, like weight lifting, that is extraneous to the direct pursuit of fast racing. This is explained fully in Fatigue in swimming: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Swimming Science Bulletin 46a. And, despite all the interest in the training format, the heart and soul of ultra short is the perfection of stroke technique. Every rest interval is devoted to focused attention on skill. Ultra short is nothing if not efficient. What about recovery within a set? Mightn’t the march of time have an effect on that too? Ultra-short rest intervals, derived from studies on college kids, are 15 seconds for sets of 12.5s or 25s and 20 seconds for sets of 50s, 75s, or 100s. See The mechanisms of ultra-short training: the translation of Christensen’s thinking into swimming terms and its place in training programs. Swimming Science Bulletin 45. Masters swimmers can individualize these rests so that their repeats begin at the same state of recovery as younger swimmers. Here’s how. The science says that breathing, not pulse rate, is the best measure of recovery—and Dr. Rushall says that each repeat should begin before the breathing rate slows by more than 5%. This means that the sensation of breathlessness can be used as a send off signal. You push off, not when you’ve caught your breath, but at the very first easing of air hunger. When I—a 67 year-old, drop-dead sprinter—do this on a fly set of 12.5s at 50 race pace, the rest intervals begin at 8 seconds and level off at 18 seconds before neural fatigue shuts down the set. A word about 50s though. Ultra short chiefly trains the type of endurance that is fueled by inhaled oxygen. Now, at the elite level, 50s are no-breathers—and ultra short has to be modified for these hypoxic dashes (see Swimming Science Bulletin 47). But at the masters level, your race times inevitably slow, and breath holding ceases to be an option. Your 50s become more aerobic, such that fewer changes are required in the ultra-short format. (At age 44, I could no-breathe a 50 fly in 23 seconds. Now, at 27 seconds, the need for air is overwhelming.)