Amsepamse
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For 75’s, I would start with 25s rest. When you can make all (or close to) 30, lower your start time to 20s rest. Then you work towards lowering your goal time with the same start time until you are at 25s rest again. Rinse and repeat.
For 50’s, the same but 20s towards 15s.I think that race time predictions only become usefull when you can actually train at the proposed 4-6x race distance without first fail. For a 500 that would mean you can hold close to 30×75 on target time. For 50’s at least 40x at target time.
I also agree with billratio on your race strategy; having seen a lot of 400m races, best results are seen when there is at most 3s between fastest and slowest 50. If you’re doing yards, then less than that. The tricky part with 400m/500y is pacing your first 50.
Remember you are training to maintain a 34s pace. Account for the start and your first 50 should not be faster than 32s. Every second you gain on your first 50 you pay for on all the other 50’sNo matter what training strategy used, attendance will always be the single most determining success factor.
for the low attendees, I would suggest focusing sets so that each event will have three exposures weekly.
as for results, I would expect 10 weeks or more; at the start they complete 12-16 of the offered sets (3-4x race distance) and towards the end they complete 20-24 (5-6x race distance). Then you change some parameter so that in the next cycle they can only complete 3-4x race distance.I see all over the place that each event is trained several times a day or every day. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think I remember that the key idea of USRPT is recovery (and race pace of course) and each type of set/event should be done with a day of recovery in between. 3x/week i believe was a proposed frequency for any given set or event.
Coachpaul, are you rotating your events 100/200 each stroke/week (that would be 8 sessions á 3 sets), or how is your week planned with different strokes/events?
Freestyle and backstroke: body/head position floating and then kicking. Freestyle breathing from a side kicking and switching sides. The tricky part is adding arms and maintaining body position when breathing.
No drills; just work on those aspects.
Butterfly and breaststroke: start with arms and breathing pattern from a floating position. Legs comes naturally when you have the body movement established.
These kids train only once a week for 30 weeks/year, so building fours strokes takes many years. The once weekly in my opinion is too much time between practices and they forget (muscle memory) in between.
Train them daily and you will have four strokes easy before they are six years old.
My experience is that the overuse of “drills” greatly delays the progression towards completing four strokes.I train 7-9 as well as 9-11 yo age groupers
What are drills?
If one swimmer is well positioned and has low breathing freestyle, does that swimmer need to kick the same superman drill as some other swimmer? Does one-armed butterfly improve your butterfly? Is two-kick-one-pull breaststroke appropriate? Maybe if you do it just for the fun of it…
What do you want to achieve with your swimmer doing drills? I see it often enough with drills having the opposite effect because the follow-up is insufficient.
I tend to pick one swimmer to the side working specifically on something that needs fixing. This of course requires a free water space and other coaches that can cover for you.
Instead of one-goggle breathing, I would like to propose freestyle breathing with both ears in the water…We just started with USRPT (second week), and what we observed is that many slow-swimming technical issues seem to resolve themselves with fast swimming. Especially with butterfly and breaststroke. Freestyle breathing was also greatly improved for some of the worst example swimmers when fast swimming was introduced.
I totally agree! Drills are a complete waste of time. I’ve seen my fellow coaches spend all their time nagging on smimmers on how to perform the drill instead of focusing on the objective of the drill.
And what is good technique anyways? Good technique changes with who holds the current world record.Three key features define successfull swimming; strength, ability to grab the water, and reduce water resistance = DPS and frequency = speed.
