Amsepamse
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My experience with USRPT is that your PB really does not matter in chosing target time. You can really start with any target time, and if you complete the set you drop your target time. The drop should be large enough to be reasonably measurable. Small drops will result in more frequent time reductions. Big drops will require more sets at the same pace until the next drop.
Especially for swimmers coming of traditional training it can be mentally more beneficial to start at an “easy” target and then work towards the “single failure” set and then to sneak them in to the whole concept that failure is beneficial.
Soon enough, they will normalize to an appropriate fail pace where they will need to push to complete the set to achieve the next pace reduction.
It is not necessary to “correlate” to race times. The improvement over time is what is important and race pace improvement will correlate with race time improvement. The “slope” is more important than the actual time, so to say.For one hour workouts in USRPT format, you should not need carb supplementation. The whole idea with USRPT is that glycogen depletion should not be determining your ability to perform the work (unlike “traditional” training, where glycogen depletion is the outcome of high volume training).
Drinking water between sets should be sufficient for you.I guess this is an example of the mental spect. Clearly she can hold that speed since she does it at races. What do you do different? Pool warmup? Land warmup? Preparation?
If you think about it, a significant portion of every practice is wasted on pool warmup. Who starts a race directly from a pool warmup?I would also like that write-up.
I have for a some time argued (not on this forum) that lactate is not the reason for getting tired, but merely a marker for excertion levels and type of metabolism used. There is no scientific evidence that serum lactate would cause fatigue. Lab rats have been injected with insane amounts of lactate without showing any sign of pain or fatigue. Supersprinters can reach “lethal levels” of lactate without being much physically affected. So, there is probably a great cause-and-effect mixup here.
Neuronal fatigue and overheating I believe are much more important factors in the experience of fatigue. “lactate numbness” I believe is merely the bodys protection against overheating or electrolyte depletion in motor neurons (I think this has also been argued earlier on this forum and Rushall as well). For that reason I believe that “lactate tolerance” sets are just insane – to go on training past the point of numbing fatigue – you would probably be better off to rest and then go on when recovered.Great job!
About your 50’s… if your girl was training off the blocks at 11.4, then 24.4 at the meet is an excellent result! Add the half second for the turn on first lap and then add 1.5-2s for no dive on second lap and you would expect 25.5-26.
Another comment also on not hitting race splits: I think your intervals for Nx25/50 may be too long, and your intervals for sprint 25’s too short. As your setup is now, I believe your aerobic work (USRPT is aerobic) is too anaerobic, and your anaerobic work is too aerobic (not enough full recovery).If this is a huge problem, it is possible to simplify to just accept that LC/SC are not exactly convertable. If so, you can use a strategy to only change practice target times when swimmers complete their sets (e.g. 20X without Three fails or two consecutive fails).
I realise that this is individual, and some swimmers will never be able to complete more than 12x and still improve, while others might need in excess of 25x @target pace to actually improve. Look where they plateau and you should have a fair estimate.
I don’t think that 51.6 yards “converts” to 58.77 LCM. This would assume that the first 10 meters are equal in speed to the last 10.
We’ve been doing it kind of like that too. In a 50m pool we split it in three or four sections (12m or 15m sections) doing water starts. For these kids, 50 m is aerobic enough for USRPT to be valuable (and 9-10yo’s aren’t particularly alactic-CP-ATP). Otherwise it has been 25s for the 50m events.
I did not include 100 stroke results above because we had not competed very much on those distances earlier, so the pb rate was quite high, but of little comparative interest.
I coach a similar group (10-12y) and face the same issues with bf. Actually I’m experimenting with 25s with block start and walking back and as a alternative 25s bf w/ fins.
Great input!
It should be stressed though, that we’ve never had so few DQ’s with the younger participants, and this year, we were more confident with entering the older ones for the 50…Further updates on progression (from any competition, last one was two weeks ago) average improvement (seconds):
25 bf: 1,33s (15/20 pb)
50 bf: 4,15s (6/7 pb)
50 bk: 2,88s (21/22 pb)
50 br: 1,77s (19/24 pb)
50 fr: 2,46s (22/26 pb)So here it comes:
out of 154 swims, 131 PBs (85%). All swimmers PB’d on 2 or more of their swims.
Example average improvement on 100m IM for the group: 6,5% (from 1:52,94 [range 1:35,31-2:00,23] to 1:46,07 [range l:28,72-1:55,69]). Last years improvement rate was 3,2% (1:54,34 [1:51,67-2:01,98] to 1:50,83 [1:40,13-2:06,98]).
the competition distances were
25bf, 50bk, 50br, 50fr, 100 IM (9-10 yo)
50bf, 100bk, 100br, 100fr, 100IM (11 yo)
Success rate can be connected with attendance rate (no regression lines available though…)Best results were seen with bk, br and fr.
Mostly had problems with improvement on butterfly. We’ve been doing 12,5’s on bf, since most swimmers were doing 25’s at the meet. It didn’t seem to be very efficient for bf though… butterfly PB success rate was only 76%. Anyone have any ideas on a better strategy? Maybe 15-20m sprints AFAP from the blocks/wall?Anyone else that has experienced something similar? I can imagine you wouldn’t see this in swimmers coming from an oldschool type training, as they have something to fall back on..?
Training for 200 doing 25s you would want to be in the range 30-40 made. 10-12 isn’t many enough to be conditioning for 200m/y. That is more in the range for being conditioning for 100 m/y. For 200 I would think that 50s or 75s are more appropriate.
The number made to create an adaptation is actually quite small (just has to be consistence) and where the 4 to 6 x race distance came from is “purely” a guess.
You might be right (although 4-6x is from the bulletins), and I’ve seen from your posts you’ve done this for a while.
At what numbers made (as in times race distance) have you seen the best improvement in race times before you change a parameter for 100, 200 and 400 respectively? (in general, there are always individual differences of course).
Do you also have anything for 800/1500?4-6 times race distance? For many that is a GUARANTEED best time, as opposed to being predictive.
Isn’t that the idea with working at certain paces?
And making a prediction should be based on what you actually believe you will achieve – otherwise it’s just jotting down dream-times and hoping for the best.The basis for a good prediction is what you can repeatedly achieve on short intervals at 4-6x race distance.
Let’s say you recently achieved doing 20+ 25’s on your 100 target pace with 15s rest before your first fail on repeated occasions. It is time to up your game with a new goal time and on that set your first fail is after 7 25’s, and you abandon after 15 25’s. It is unreasonable to believe that you will make the time on 100 for the new goal time, because you haven’t been conditioned for that distance with that speed yet.
You would probably make the 100 time for the old target though.
