Feasibility and effect of sets
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Hey all,
I’ve been implementing USRPT recently in our club. I coach the kids from 11 till 14 years of age, they are 14 kids and I have two lanes. I set them up with a piece of paper with their target times and a sheet where they note down the results of each set (first miss, completed repetitions at race pace and total completed repetitions).
However, I was wondering some things:
- The kids have a very hard time doing sets of 50’s. E.g. 20×50 (scm) @RP200 free. Half of them never reach rep. 6 of the set holding their time. Should I start at a pace slower then their personal best and build up?
- What is considered a good set of 25’s targeting a 200m race? I do 20×25’s for a 100, so I guess it should be a lot more. Because 20×25 @RP200 would be “easy” in relation to the same set @RP100.
Greets!
If you only starting doing it recently it is understandable that they wouldn’t make it very far. Rushall says when you are transitioning to USRPT you can start at a little slower than race pace (one or two seconds?).
I don’t think it really matters what number you set when doing 200 RP 25s. It should just be a number where they will all eventually fail.
Rushall says to do 40×25 for the 200 and 30×25 for the 100. If they are able to complete 40 at RP then they should be doing a faster RP.
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
I have found that 200 free pace is probably the hardest pace for my swimmers to hold. I usually try to stay with 50’s as much as possible but do throw in 25’s at P200 occasionally. To me the key to differentiating between 25’s @ P100 and 25’s @ P200 is the amount of rest. If they are doing them at 100 pace I try to make sure they are getting between 15 and 20 sec rest( or less if we are doing a short amount of repeats) but when trying to hit their 200 pace I will try to make sure they have between 10 and 15 seconds.
When they are doing 50’s I have them switch to 25’s after the second or third failure. If they fail on the 25’s I have them continue doing 25’s where they do double leg kicking for 12.5 and easy swim for 12.5, on the 50 interval. This way they are doing something non stressful but still race relevant instead of congregating in the “Failure” lane.At this point most of my swimmers cannot complete 20×25 @RP100 on 35s. So I’m planning on having them progress on this set. When they start to make it till the end, do I first move to 30×25 before increasing the pace?
My swimmers are nowhere near to complete a set like 40×25 @RP100 on 30 or 25×50 @RP200 on 50/55s as shown here: https://twitter.com/agswimcoach/status/456102291439759360
Those are some pretty hard sets. I try to keep the sets as small as possible, so their first failure is at least over half way the set. Otherwise it’s just depressing.One thing that I have not completely grasped is the interaction between distance and intensity over the course of a macro/meso cycle. Rushall does talk about this in the DVD sets, but it’s not quite clear to me (yet) how to manage these two.
Hi, Kevin. I understand what you are experiencing. I can tell you that for our high school team, we repeated 12 x 50’s and 16 x 25’s. We did 2 sets of 50’s and one set of 25’s, and we only did this three days a week. Even with these lower numbers, we still had the biggest overall improvement in swimmers than we have ever had. We only had 75 minutes for practice, so there wasn’t much rest in between sets.
In our off season, I am experimenting with my own son. We are repeating 40 x 25 at 200rp. I want to see how the 25’s with more reps translates to his actual race time. We are doing this for free and breast. We are also doing 24 x 25’s at 100rp for all strokes. Obviously, the big difference is we are training lots of 25’s compared to our high school training. Our first meet is in May, and even though it is a lcm race and we are training scy, I’m hoping to get some anecdotal evidence that I can use for the next season. If I can get the same results with 25’s that I got with 50’s, it will give me some better training options.
I’m pretty new to coaching USRPT but I haven’t found the large repeat numbers to be depressing my swimmers. I think it’s just important to make sure they understand how it works and that success doesn’t mean completing all the repeats.
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
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