Ultra Short Training At Race Pace

In USRPT there are only two amounts of rest, :15 rest when doing 25s and :20 rest when doing 50s, 75s or 100s. Remember, you do these as "skip if missed" and when you have two failures in a row (including extra rest) or four failures in the set, you are done with the set. So although the sets of 50s is written as 30 x 50, you should never ever be able to do all 30, ever. Same with the 75s. I think the actual set is 20 x 75, whatever, you are not supposed to make all of them. If you do, the set is too easy. You are supposed to fail before you get to the end of the set. I assumed that people had access to this table (or others like it that exist) but given all the questions about what constitutes an USTRP set, maybe not. I extracted the attached table from the following article. coachsci.sdsu.edu/.../ultra40b.pdf Naturally you should read more about USTRP and not just do the sets; in other words, read the entire article (or get your understanding of the technique in a similar way). 8492 (I do always smile at the -- entirely appropriate IMO! -- pairing of "pre-pubertal" and masters swimmers in the column for 50s race-pace training. I think I'll start referring to drop-dead masters sprinters are pre-pubertal from now on.) Anyway, the two suggested sets in the table that give me the most pause are the following: - 20 x 50 at 100 race-pace, presumably with 20 sec rest (this seems to be Rushall's sweet spot for most things) - 20 x 75 at 200 race-pace with 20 sec rest I understand that these sets are designed for failure, but there is just-out-of-reach impossible and then there is the impossibility of doing many repeats of 50s at 100 pace with only 20 sec rest. That's pretty close to a full-out sprint and the set (IMO) makes little sense in a program that is designed to avoid lactate build-up. The other set is almost as bad. I did a variation of the 30 x 25 set yesterday. I did it fly on the 0:30 and my variation was that I took #10 (and #20 and #30) as an easy swim whether or not I was hitting my target time of 13s. Rushall seems to have two reasons for his "skip at failure" scheme: one is to stress his target energy systems to a high degree (I don't have all the terminology down pat but I guess that's the alactic system and the aerobic system, simultaneously) and also to provide a metric for improvement. I don't think my modification affects the first purpose at all, in fact I could even argue that active recovery is better than more on-the-wall recovery for this purpose. In terms of measuring improvement, I can do that by tracking/improving the average of my 27 fast repeats. Psychologically, I do better with a set number of repeats in mindset rather than a "go until you fail" system, even if that means I slightly fall off my desired race pace. I just don't buy Rushall's apparent belief that the path to swimming success is extremely narrow. (Put another way: if you think of swimming performance as a multidimensional hypersurface, then Rushall seems to think that the global maximum is a very sharp peak while I think it is reasonably broad.)

In USRPT there are only two amounts of rest, :15 rest when doing 25s and :20 rest when doing 50s, 75s or 100s. Remember, you do these as "skip if missed" and when you have two failures in a row (including extra rest) or four failures in the set, you are done with the set. So although the sets of 50s is written as 30 x 50, you should never ever be able to do all 30, ever. Same with the 75s. I think the actual set is 20 x 75, whatever, you are not supposed to make all of them. If you do, the set is too easy. You are supposed to fail before you get to the end of the set. I assumed that people had access to this table (or others like it that exist) but given all the questions about what constitutes an USTRP set, maybe not. I extracted the attached table from the following article. coachsci.sdsu.edu/.../ultra40b.pdf Naturally you should read more about USTRP and not just do the sets; in other words, read the entire article (or get your understanding of the technique in a similar way). 8492 (I do always smile at the -- entirely appropriate IMO! -- pairing of "pre-pubertal" and masters swimmers in the column for 50s race-pace training. I think I'll start referring to drop-dead masters sprinters are pre-pubertal from now on.) Anyway, the two suggested sets in the table that give me the most pause are the following: - 20 x 50 at 100 race-pace, presumably with 20 sec rest (this seems to be Rushall's sweet spot for most things) - 20 x 75 at 200 race-pace with 20 sec rest I understand that these sets are designed for failure, but there is just-out-of-reach impossible and then there is the impossibility of doing many repeats of 50s at 100 pace with only 20 sec rest. That's pretty close to a full-out sprint and the set (IMO) makes little sense in a program that is designed to avoid lactate build-up. The other set is almost as bad. I did a variation of the 30 x 25 set yesterday. I did it fly on the 0:30 and my variation was that I took #10 (and #20 and #30) as an easy swim whether or not I was hitting my target time of 13s. Rushall seems to have two reasons for his "skip at failure" scheme: one is to stress his target energy systems to a high degree (I don't have all the terminology down pat but I guess that's the alactic system and the aerobic system, simultaneously) and also to provide a metric for improvement. I don't think my modification affects the first purpose at all, in fact I could even argue that active recovery is better than more on-the-wall recovery for this purpose. In terms of measuring improvement, I can do that by tracking/improving the average of my 27 fast repeats. Psychologically, I do better with a set number of repeats in mindset rather than a "go until you fail" system, even if that means I slightly fall off my desired race pace. I just don't buy Rushall's apparent belief that the path to swimming success is extremely narrow. (Put another way: if you think of swimming performance as a multidimensional hypersurface, then Rushall seems to think that the global maximum is a very sharp peak while I think it is reasonably broad.)