Ultra Short Training At Race Pace

Good point!

ok as an example, I'm really interested in training my 100 Free. I swim 25s on 100 Race pace, going on 25 seconds? Is this fast? And to answer this, yeah, I'd say it is. If you can do--say--10 x 25 on 25 seconds and hold 15 on them I can't imagine you wouldn't be able to break a minute in a 100 yard race. In fact I think you'd destroy 1:00.

My concerns are: Will he burn out from years of intense coaching by his dad? Is he is an early bloomer? Will his progression slow down when he stops growing? By training Ultra Short, will he ever build the necessary base to bring home his LCM 100's & 200s? Time will tell, Times will tell. I doubt he'll burn out. From what I see he's extremely motivated, but who knows. I suppose we'll have to wait and see :P This Rushall method still seems very little used, so there's no one we can really use as an example to show that. But I really think that the way makes logical sense. But I really still do think that dryland training/strenght training does help in the longrun. Well, I'll be training the set @Knelson has been swimming for the next two months then. Anyway The problem with this sort of techinque is, from what I see Rushall is advising small 40 minute sessions. Michael Andrew said he did 3 sessions. It's easy for him to just go outside in his backyard and jump in the pool, but for me where it's a 5 minute drive, just to get out for a 40 minute session and come back twice more. Sounds difficult in itself :/

Help please! So in SCM, is this how I do it? 5 rounds of 6 x 25's on :30 holding 15 or under rest 100 easy in between fly/free/back/free/*** by round ==>this would be for my 100's of stroke & free. maybe even 50's. or rather, to appreciate the 50's more. attempt 30 x 25's on :30 sit out if I "miss" 15 and start with the next one. no problemo is I am doing this myself, but that would mean if you miss and your buddies don't, you are starting the next one at the opposite ends? or do you swim an easy one on the one your miss so you start together again? If I do 12.5's, then i'd have to swim easy to finish the 25, or do them as back half 12.5's to the wall, is that correct? And attempt to accelerate or increase velocity or whatever the term is - basically, don't just get to the 12.5 and totally tighten up? And there's really no way to accurately gauge my time?? Can you also do 1/2 pool with turn as the 25? Of course, you'd need a good push off which would be hard, but then you'd have a bunch of turn work? The paper is kind of inconsistent in amount of rest but the 20-30 rounds are always done without splitting them up with easy swimming in between. He gives a guideline of 10 seconds rest for 25s, 20 seconds for 50s, 30 seconds for 100s. He gives a sample 2 hour workout however that doesn't seem to follow his guidelines unless intended for very young swimmers. The workout has 3 race pace sets. The 3 sets he gives are 20x50m free on 60 seconds, 30x25m fly on 45 seconds, and 30x25m back on 45 seconds. You are supposed to fail miserably at first and get better over time. He expects some people to start failing 1/4 through the set the first time they try. If you fail and you are doing 25s or 75s you will be at the opposite end of the pool from the rest of the team after taking one round off. You don't swim that round easy. You can't really do distances that aren't pool lengths as you need to get your time each time (and he says the coach shouldn't be timing). The shorter distances I think he does doing widths of the pool. That is why some of the lengths in his examples are odd like 20m.

You are supposed to fail miserably at first and get better over time. He expects some people to start failing 1/4 through the set the first time they try. This matches my experience. It gets easier really quickly - like, every session you do better - but you hit a wall. At that point it becomes a big psychological struggle. Maybe someone with a coach or team could keep the motivation up, but I think it's too repetitive and exhausting to do it every workout solo. Twice a week is probably perfect.

Help please! So in SCM, is this how I do it? 5 rounds of 6 x 25's on :30 holding 15 or under rest 100 easy in between fly/free/back/free/*** by round ==>this would be for my 100's of stroke & free. maybe even 50's. or rather, to appreciate the 50's more. attempt 30 x 25's on :30 sit out if I "miss" 15 and start with the next one. no problemo is I am doing this myself, but that would mean if you miss and your buddies don't, you are starting the next one at the opposite ends? or do you swim an easy one on the one your miss so you start together again? If I do 12.5's, then i'd have to swim easy to finish the 25, or do them as back half 12.5's to the wall, is that correct? And attempt to accelerate or increase velocity or whatever the term is - basically, don't just get to the 12.5 and totally tighten up? And there's really no way to accurately gauge my time?? Can you also do 1/2 pool with turn as the 25? Of course, you'd need a good push off which would be hard, but then you'd have a bunch of turn work?

We don't have a coach on the side to keep control! We did a progression of something similar to these sets last fall. We were doing it with an eye on 1650 times. If I were to do this with an eye on 100 or 200 times, I'd do rounds of it with rest in between rounds. For holding the times, you put your thumb right on it, that is one of the key challenges. For our swimmers it was at around 600 yards that people wanted to back off, but a little coach inspiration and a reminder of what the set was about helped people stay on task. As for the times, it's a pretty quick matter with a spreadsheet to adjust the times and number of repeats to make sure everyone gets the proper challenge. If you look in the coaching section, I uploaded one that does those calculations for you. I prefer to have everyone doing their proper interval and adjust so that the set time is the same for everyone than to have some folks twiddling their thumbs while others get hammered by the set construction.

I set a variation on this for our group on Tuesday evening. We did 30x25 on 40. This is slightly more rest than prescribed by the method but my thinking was that: We have a variety of ages and fitness levels We have people doing different strokes We have different ability levels We don't have a coach on the side to keep control! Therefore, I wanted us all to go off the same interval. Personally, I set off on 18s reps (a couple of 17s) on ***, and pretty much did all 30. At one end you have to turn right round to see the clock, so I may have just done a couple of 19s but close enough. We did it so that if you missed the time you stopped and joined back in again after 50m. It was hard but doable and I think I'd keep the rest about the same, even though we had a couple of freestylers kicking around the 14s mark. I'm one of the fitter members of the team and was just finding that I had to really focus the effort towards the end to make the time. I'd say a good half dropped. It may be that not everyone was at the right pace - some of the group don't really deal in race pace as they don't race. I was really tired at the end - and it was definitely a different kind of tired. It was very aerobic, but also hard muscularly. It though it might end up feeling more lactic, but as the paper suggests, it didn't. Most importantly, feedback was that people really enjoyed doing the set and it made a nice change. So, I'd definitely adding something like this to the mix.

My understanding is that Rushall doesn't like mixing strokes in the sets. Does he give a good reason why not?

Don't people get in each other's way? Fast lanes & slow lanes, perhaps? :-)