Reply To: Now what do I do?
This is exactly what I am going to try and get a feel for over the next month. I have 3 boys who I’ve been working with and tracking every set with a stopwatch to avoid any cheating. I know they say it’s a waste of time to time your swimmers, but it’s easy to do with only 3 swimmers. None of the swimmers have experienced any growth spurts since last year.They are all between 16-18.
Our sets hve been fairly repetitive because 2 of the boys have the goal of making it to districts before they graduate. The other is a junior, and he is training for more events. Here is what we have been doing:
25/50/75 free sets. training 400% distance of the 100 free with 16 x 25. training 300% of 200 with 12 x 50, and only 16 x 75 for the 500 which isn’t even 300%.
25/50 breast. Same sets as the free
25 back. same set as the 25 free
50 fly/back. We swim 25 fly then 25 back to work the middle strokes of the 200 IM, and we swimm 300% race distance there, too. Hoping that the sets of free and breast will take care of the rest. Adding lots of back to breast turn work between sets. This is the one that I’m curious about. We did two weeks of this leading up to winter sr. champs, and got good results. Now, we will have a solid 6 weeks to work this.
I know it’s not a lot of variety, and I’ve just started doing some 75’s at 200 rp based on what some people have said, but it won’t be enough, I believe, to really be a factor.
All of my swimmers will get to race the events we have been training for at usa meets over the next month, and then I’m going to sit down and see how closely the training times equate to actual race performance.
I really do like the ideas of Dr. Rushall, but I also agree with another post of yours where you stated we have to be willing to experiment with this to find out what works best. My repeat numbers seem to be much lower than others here, but that’s just the approach I decided to take.
For both meets, I am going to do a 2 day (50% then 25%) rest/taper. I want to leave them feeling like they had a shot to swim well, but a full 3 day recovery and a shave will make them faster. Might sound silly, but these are sharp kids, and they know that this won’t be the full recovery/taper we will follow in March.
For better or worse, I will post as much data as I can after these meets. After all the help you’ve given me with your advice, oldschool, it’s the least I can do!
