Reply To: hard data of our last 8 weeks – poor results followed
Great to see you’re recording all this data so that you can look back and make assessments like this. There’s a huge amount of info there but I’ll just ask a few questions and make a few points. Sorry if there’s anything I’ve misunderstood.
What have you based your target times on? You say for instance that one swimmer’s PB is 1:10.45 but their target is 1:06. This is way too fast.
In your spreadsheet there are a lot of 7s in the 1F column which again would suggest that the targets are too fast.
Having said that, there are a lot where they have their first fail at 7 or 8 but then carry on to complete 27 or more. In my experience that doesn’t seem right. Once you’ve hit your first fail you can usually only manage another 4 to 6 until the next failure and then same again to the next.
How long have you been using this program? Is it just these eight weeks or before that too?
It looks like you have limited pool time so you’ve tried to spread the events out over the 8 weeks as best you can but this means inevitable compromises. I wonder if it would be better to reduce the number of events a little so that more time can be spent on those that are important to each swimmer.
You make a comment about lactate build up. Again in my experience the aim of this training is to avoid excessive lactate build up since it ruins your stroke mechanics which has a huge effect on your speed. Training with the right target times and then swimming at that speed in the race will prevent this.
I’d be interested to see the split times for these swimmers in their recent races to see how they compare with their training times.
Hope this helps
