billratio
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
How far out are you from State? I switched to training exclusively for events we were swimming at sections 1 month out. 3 weeks of packing in race pace yards and 1 week of 3 day protocol. Can’t say if it was better than it would have been if we had just kept training as we were but it definitely wasn’t bad. That’s what we did and they all hit their paces for the most part. You can read back through my sections thread if you want more detailed results.
It would also allow for more turns/starts/skill work if you dropped the irrelevant event training.
How have they been swimming so far this year? Are any of them hitting their paces in meets yet?
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
She has always been with our club but just came back from high school season. I only have one girl on my club team who was on the high school team I coached during girls season. So we are going through all the same doubts and disbelief over again. It’s just frustrating trying to get everyone to buy in. Once you think they finally are, one bad meet sets you back to the start psychologically.
Can you layout what a typical week of 200 training would be for your swimmers, oldschool? Like I said before, we only have 6 hours a week to practice so it’s tough to train for every event.
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
About 8 weeks. How long do you think it should take?
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
I tend to agree with your thoughts on drills. My questions are largely regarding constructing strokes. Surely you don’t go straight into full freestyle? Where do you begin your progressions when teaching the different strokes?
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
Have you tried a tempo trainer? Off the top of my head I don’t know how precise they are but I think a 10th of a second. You could set it to beep every 15 seconds and then rest 15 seconds so you’d leave on the beep and try to finish on the beep. Or you could do it where you rest 30 seconds. I think a lot of people use them for race pace training.
For my swimmers I’ve tried to call out times for them often enough that they start to figure out the timing on their own. I had one girl where I timed 100s of 25s for her while she tried to hold 13.75. As the season went on she got a lot better at self timing. As I timed a few throughout the set she’d be able to tell partially by feel and partially by looking at the clock even if she was only .2 off her time. Sometimes she’d look up and see me and she’d say “That was slow” and sure enough she was 13.9 or whatever it was. I think without a coach there to check against though, self timing is going to be tough.
Edit: I should add that I never let them do a set completely on their own without me at least timing them every few to make sure they are actually on pace.
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
I think she could have gone faster if she paced it a little better. My two 200 girls with similar times to your girl had these splits at sections.
29.3, 32.1, 32.3, 32.1 for 2:05.9
29.4, 32.0, 32.7, 31.8 for 2:06.0
The first girl was 2:07.5 in prelims because she went a hard 28.5 on the first 50 and couldn’t hold on at the end. They were both swimming a goal time of 31.7 and 31.9 i think (i’d have to look back at the data) by the end of the year.
When you add in the turn they were close to what I was expecting. I believe in the 1-1.2 second add per turn that old school talks about. I have theory that a good tech suit can account for a bit of the turn time though.
I was happy with them if they could make it up to 12 straight 50s without stopping. The first girl did make 18 without a miss one time during the year. Sometimes we would do 2 rounds of a 200 set with a mini recovery in between. I think whatever you can do to get more yards at race pace is good. I know they are supposed to only go until 3 failures but sometimes my girls swam even better on the second round than the first round.
I’m just letting you know what we did and what our results were. It’s only a sample of a few 200 swimmers so do with it what you will. I guess you could argue that all the 500 training they did helped them aerobically. I only had one 200 swimmer who didn’t swim the 500 so I can’t say if there was a difference.
I also should add that they were 2:10.5 and 2:09.7 respectively going into sections. So the rest and tech suits seemed to be necessary for them to hit their pace.
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
Great idea to test that out. I have found the same thing, though I didn’t test it scientifically.
It’s hard a large group of swimmers but it’s very important to keep them honest on these things. I don’t know that keeping them honest is the right way to phrase it because I don’t think they are intentionally getting their times wrong. I’ll often ask my swimmers what they went and then tell them what I had for their time. I think that helps them start to figure out how to more accurately time themselves.
I definitely need to start doing a better job timing them.
Question: When you time your swimmers when do you start your stopwatch? I start it when they are underwater with their legs still bent at the wall. I hope that’s not too late.
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
Kevin,
With our 10hr weeks we were doing 2-3 sets per day and lots of turns/starts/underwater work. It was really easy to get our training in when we only had 2-4 events to really focus on in that last month. I tried to pack as much race pace work as possible into those sets though. Multiple rounds etc. I think they got a bit tired but if they are resting when they miss they should be okay. They all claimed to be really tired and a lot of them didn’t get good times until we did the full rest for sections.Oldschool,
Thanks for that info. I think as we get more experienced we will be able to make it work. Right now we are barely fitting 3 sets into a 1.5 hr practice. This is a completely different group than my high school girls so they are still learning how to do it and I’m still trying to get them to buy in. It seems to leave very little time for skill work though. I’m working on adding a 5th practice which should help a lot."Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
I only have decent data on two IMers. The backstroke was very close to repeat 50s(34 seconds rest). The freestyle was a little slower for one and pretty much right on for the other based on repeat 50s (27-29 seconds rest). I intend to bring those rest times down next year. We did some training of 50s for breaststroke but it was very little. Our 25s doubled were not even close to the breast leg though. Would have expected 38s but both went 42-43. Butterfly was a little faster than 25s doubled. My 100 flyer took her IM and her 100 fly out in about the same time (29.2 and 29.7? I think).
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
I’m just letting you know someone read your question. I don’t have a good answer though. 🙂
My gut would say don’t take 2 weeks off. I think a couple days for Thanksgiving wouldn’t be a big deal. You might be able to get away with a week at Christmas but it would make me nervous being only a month away from your final meet. I had two girls this year miss full week mid season and they both did very well at Sections. So I think it’s definitely possible but I’d still get at least 3ish practices a week during Christmas break.
Not based on any science. Just my 2 cents.
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
We did 200 free, 200 choice, 8×25 @:40. Then some turns and two 25s off the blocks. I’m not convinced that warming up matters at all. I had a couple girls ask if they could skip warm up at section finals (they already had done turns and starts in prelims) and I let them. They performed just as well in finals as they had in prelims.
Our warm up is pretty much just a suggestion. A lot of them do less and I don’t make a big deal out of it. As long as they feel confident with what they are doing that is all I care about.
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
We also had dryland that didn’t really go that well throughout the season (I’m not the head coach). Thankfully, it wasn’t too intense because our dryland guy fell through. It was just a lot of time not well spent. For most of the last month we didn’t do any dryland so having the same amount of yards to do with more time in the pool made for more recovery time.
I’ve requested that we have no dryland at all next year.
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
Our season was only 13 weeks long for sections swimmers and we didn’t start going full USRPT until about 2 weeks into it. I don’t think the intensity fell off but by the time we were at 11 weeks we were already resting so I can’t say that it wouldn’t have.
For most of our swimmers we did something close to 3 day protocol. Sections was on a Friday so most of them went 75% on Monday, 50% on Tuesday, 25% on Wednesday and just warm up, a few turns and a couple starts on Thursday. Most of these girls were used to starting some kind of taper three weeks out so they were not happy with only one week. I cut yards a little more for a few of them (75% on Thursday/Friday then 50%, 40%, 25%, warm up).
One other important thing to note is that most of these girls were only doing 1 or 2 events at sections (3 or 4 for some). So when we really started focusing on our section events we dropped all the other training. So with a good 200 swimmer who we ultimately decided to have do the 100 back and 100 free we cut all her 200 training out and wound up offering more 100 fee/back work. So for the last 4 weeks before sections she was just doing 30-40 25s free and 30-40 25s back(each through 2 rounds). I think that might have tricked her into thinking she was getting more rest but she just was dropping irrelevant training. We had a few swimmers only doing 1 event at sections so they really had very little to do for a 2 hour practice so upping the turns and starts made it feel more like taper for them too.
I can go back and post more exact numbers if you want me to but I don’t have my workouts with me right now. I really don’t know that I’m the best person to ask. I still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m just thankful it worked out for them. As long as your girls are consistently swimming at race pace, I’d feel pretty good about it.
Our intervals stayed pretty much the same the whole year. The backstroker I talked about in an earlier post moved to @:50 instead of @:40 for the last 2 weeks because she was struggling so much.
It was pretty much free and back @:40 and fly and breast @:50. With a few exceptions. 500 free 50s @:50 and 200 free 50s @1:00. The reason we did more rest for the 200 50s was they were the same swimmers doing the 500 and the 200 at sections and they felt like they couldn’t go any faster than 500 pace when doing 200 pace 50s. I cave too easily as a coach but when I gave the extra 10 seconds I think it helped them psychologically.
I wish I could say we stuck more to exact USRPT but I’m just giving you what we really did. Having multiple rounds of sets at the same pace seemed to help us complete more at race pace. My girl who only trained for the 100 and 50 all year wasn’t going to complete 60 straight 25s at 100 pace. But when I offered 2 rounds of 16 at the start of practice and 2 rounds of 16 at a different point in practice she was able to do it (just an example, didn’t do that every day).
Hope that helps some.
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
Oldschool, just to update on my 50 swimmer. She went 24.84 at state. We were much happier with that. Nice SWAG.
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
My 13 year old who wound up going 1:02.49 was going 1:07+ most of the year. She had one really nice 1:06.2 but her time coming into the season was 1:04.3 so she felt like she wasn’t getting the conditioning as well. Her times she swam on :40 correlated much more closely to the actual time she got when we rested for Sections. They’re bound to go faster than 100 pace when @1:00 but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. My girl couldn’t make more than 2 reps when we did them @:30 so @:40 wound up being the magic number.
And she is also an IMer and a feestyler so there were a lot of days that she didn’t do our 25s @1:00 fly. Looking back she did about twice a week a set for fly @1:00.
Have you done a fully rested meet with a fast suit yet? What sets have you been doing with your daughter and what interval? I’m no expert on this and only have one flyer who is somewhat close to that speed but I can share what data I do have.
What times has she been going in meets?
"Most people have the will to win. Few have the will to prepare to win."
