How to achieve time goals in practice but not in meets
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USRPT sets can mask the problem of high stroke rates. Lactic acid does not build up like it ordinarily would because of the shortness of USRPT repeats.
So one conclusion that may be drawn is that swimmers with high stroke rates will be disappointed with their meet performance relative to similar swimmers with lower stroke rates.
Can you elaborate more on that? Is the first sentence a quote from somewhere?
What events are you talking about? 100’s? Or longer distances as 400/500’s, 800’s?You state something and draw a conclusion, can you back it up with data?
For the record: I don’t agree that a “high” stroke rate is a bad thing. I have my swimmers do the longest stroke they possibly can hold in a rhythmical fashion. You could understand rhythmical as “high(er)”.
E.g. in front crawl you will attain higher stroke rates when being able to hold upper arms in one line during the arm movement. In contrast with a “slower” catch-up (or hip-driven, or whatever you want to call it) stroke.
A long (distance-wise) stroke is good, because of the long power phase. That doesn’t necessarily mean a slow stroke. You can make long strokes at a “high” rate.
Please also define what you consider “high” in your claim.
My claim is that if swimmer A and swimmer B both achieve the exact same times in 100 of stroke USRPT sets, then the swimmer with the lower stroke rate (strokes per second) will swim faster in the meet.
Of course I did not learn this in a laboratory – it is an observation based on what I have seen with the 4 swimmers I train.
Has anyone else observed this? If the answer is yes then maybe this should be examined by those who use and/or study USRPT.
One thing that Rushall has said is that swimming has less lactic acid buildup than track because of the relatively longer recovery periods within a swimming stroke. If my observation is shared by many at least it syncs with Rushall’s theories.
Could you share the race paces, volumes in training (rep’s made at race pace), race results and stroke frequency in both training and race for those 4 swimmers? I would be very interested to see that data.
I have some of what you want:
100br sets in 20 yd pool, sets done on 35 seconds interval
Both had goal times of 17 for the past 3 sets
One used high rating to average between 15.5 and 16.2 and “swept the set” which means all of the 20-25 repeats see made with no failure. The other used lower rating to average 17 seconds approximately and may be only average 10-12 successful repeats. The higher rating swimmer’s brain was trained to do high rate swimming and lactic acid and slow times struck by the 3rd 25 of the 100 br. The slow rating swimmer started with a slow rate and had the energy to finish hard in the end. The slow rating swimmer was about 1 second faster in meet than high rate swimmer.I have other examples but this is the best one. Has anyone else noticed this effect? I think Peter Andrew cares about this type of thing as he is very concerned about MAs stroke counts in 200 fly sets.
I experienced the same thing with breaststroke sets. Was training the 100/200 with 16 x 25’s and 12 x 50’s. goal times were :16.5 for 25’s and :36 for 50’s on 30 secs. and 55 secs. intervals. Swimmer finally got close to completing set, but he was swimming at a stroke rate that could never be sustained in a race. He said that’s what he had to do to make it. I explained that if he isn’t training the way he races, then we aren’t going to get the results.
I raised goal times to 17.5 and :37 and asked him to swim it the right way. he did, and we have lowered the goal times to :15 and :33.25 in two months. It took some time to convince him that the faster way is the way they race. It takes a lot of reinforcement, but it is really a cool thing to see my swimmer training his br. with a solid technique and form that looks identical to how he races.
It doesn’t seem to me you are talking about a high stroke rate, but a stroke rate that is not sustainable for a race for a particular athlete. It says to me that the pace they are maintaining isn’t their actual 100 pace in practice. Or they just aren’t confident in their ability to maintain that type of rate at a meet?
? All The Way, HLA!All The Way, HLA!
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