Gary P
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And you failed to mention the National Jr records and now WORLD Jr. Record he set at OT.
To be honest, the World Jr Records are a bit meaningless. No swims prior to 2013 considered. Swims that are “Sr World Records” don’t count. Many swims awaiting “ratification” for an extended period of time. Andrew’s “Jr World Record” 200 IM time is 3.5 seconds slower than Phelp’s 17-18 National Age Group record in the same event.
I did mention that Andrew set 5 consecutive National Age Group records.
Skim through here looking for doc’s missives on training to race correlations, and how they tend not to fit neatly with Rushall’s suggested whole-race average for a target time. Say your 200 breaststroker has a best time of 2:28.0. Rushall has you training 50’s at :37.0. What doc seems to have found, and I’m starting to see as well as I accumulate more personal performance data, is that the practice:race correlation for a set of 50’s on ~20 seconds rest is to the average of the back three 50’s of a 200, which, in the case of our hypothetical 2:28 200 breaststroker, is probably something more like a :38.0. If on Monday your swimmer guts out a set at :37.0 (or faster, as you mentioned she sometimes outswims her race pace when she’s feeling good), it’s not entirely surprising to me that she can’t maintain that all week.
Its hard to coach a swimmer to go slower, but when she’s busting race pace on a USRPT set because she feels good, I’d be inclined to throttle her back. You’re looking for sustainable consistency. When she can hit race pace all week, then advance it incrementally.
Sorry, I think your reply which detailed your set structures overlapped mine. Now I understand what you meant with your descriptions.
You seem to be dealing with some pretty high quality athletes. On this forum, be aware that you’re conversing mostly with a handful of self-coached Masters swimmers and age-group and high school team coaches. I fit into the former column.
Doc’s the one you want to get in contact with. He’s the one here using a USRPT-like system with a large sample size of athletes who may be somewhere close in caliber to the athletes you are coaching, and has also collected a trove of statistical data. I could give you my personal perspective, but my capacity is so far below that of the swimmers you are coaching, it wouldn’t be particularly valuable to you.
Maybe I’m not understanding, but those sets don’t sound like USRPT to me. Seems like you forgot the “Ultra-Short” part. You should be doing some combination of 25’s and 50’s…..at most maybe some 75’s if you’re training in a short course pool for 200M Breast Long Course.
If I misunderstood and you are doing USRPT as prescribed in Rushall’s bulletins, some of us have found that the short rest intervals he prescribes lead to accumulated fatigue over a number of practices, or are just too aggressive to get sufficient race pace exposure, and are increasing the rest intervals accordingly.
As documented in this forum, I had great success early adhering to “conventional” USPRT doctrine. Eventually, however, my progression stalled out. I even went backwards for a while, getting slower towards the end of the first season. I had to do something akin to a traditional taper to get back to the training paces I was doing mid-season. I had a successful final meet, but was looking forward to improving more in the coming year.
After a short off season, I got back at it last fall. Unfortunately, I failed to make any pace advances in my core races (100, 200, 400/500 free). Frustrated, I diversified by adding longer distances and different strokes to the mix. Later in the season, I circled back to the 100 free, and, based on doc’s preaching, started tweaking the rest interval, giving myself a little extra rest. I had a bit of a break through in that race in the last meet of the season, setting a new non-shaved, no-tech-suit best by a fair margin. I actually had a better first 50 than I did when I had my best shaved, tech-suited race, although I didn’t bring it home as fast. (In retrospect, that’s not surprising given that I did very few sets of 50’s in the second half of the season.)
Anyway, now that I have a second masters season under my belt, I have a handful of meaningful race results where I can start “looking at the data,” as doc says, for more specific training-race correlations. I don’t have a lot of data, but patterns are starting to emerge.
My training set for 200 free is typically a 33.00 target time on a :53 interval. That’s exactly Rushall’s suggested rest, if a bit less than doc seems to prescribe. I typically experience my first failure around rep 8-10, and get to 14-18 before failing out. I only have two quality 200 free swims, but that’s 6 splits for 50’s 2-4. The average of the 6 is 32.89, with a standard deviation of .79 seconds. Take out the one final 50 on the swim where I went out a second too slow on the first 50 and closed really fast, and the average is 33.15 with a more acceptable standard deviation of .53. Either way, doc’s observed correlation is almost spot on. On the “Rushall plan,” I’ve been stuck at 33.0 for forever, thinking something’s wrong with me because I should be able be able to go deep in a set holding 32.low’s. Clearly I need to shake up the rest/work ratio so I can swim faster and get over the hump.
As I mentioned earlier, I did just that (more rest than Rushall calls for, allowing faster target times) on my 25’s at 100 pace and saw improvement, especially in the front half. I was at 14.0 for a long time on the “Rushall Plan,” and went out in 27.93 in a 100 free in January. Went from a :29 to a :34 interval, dropped my target time to 13.75, and went out 27.58 in March. After that, I said “what the hell” and went to a 40 second interval, dropping my target time to 13.5. Went out in 27.13 in April. Long story short, I didn’t get slower taking more rest that Rushall prescribes, I got faster. And doc’s formula for front-half 100 performance was, again, almost spot on.
Doc, I’m now buying what you’re selling. I’m working on improving my long distance stuff right now in preparation for a couple open water events this summer, but I’ll be implementing “USRPT 2.doc” once my focus shifts back to the pool.
I’m a 47 year old Masters swimmer, and have been self training with USRPT for about a year and a half. I’m primarily a “utility freestyler,” willing to race anything from a 50 sprint to a 2 mile open water event. Last year I focused sharply on maximizing my potential at distances from 100-500. More recently, I’ve been working on the longer distance stuff. Here are my thoughts.
-I agree with Marlin that an hour long workout, including warm up and recovery, means you probably don’t have the time to optimize the 1650, and that you should focus more on the 500. That doesn’t mean you can’t do some training for, and actually race, a 1650. Your objective, however, will be more about learning to control your pace than capacity building specifically for that event.
-Speaking of controlling pace, that’s pretty key for for the 500, too. While I see some value in occasional over-speed training, I think it’s a gamble to do regularly with distance events as it can lure you into going out too fast in an actual race. If you want to get to failure sooner to compress the time, go with longer distance intervals instead (see next two bullet points).
-For the 500, I would start at 50’s, but strongly suggest moving to 75’s once you’ve adapted to USRPT work. I found that the pace I could maintain doing 50’s on 20 seconds rest was not representative of what I could hold in an actual 500 race. I saw a much closer practice-to-race speed correlation when I switched to 75’s.
-I’ve also found that 25 x 100 at 1650 race pace doesn’t really duplicate the demand of a 1650 race. With 20 seconds of rest every 100, I can hit all 25 at actual race pace with relative ease. I think you have to go much longer to really build capacity for that race, offering something like 30 x 150 with the expectation that you’ll fail out somewhere in the low 20’s, or 24 X 200 with the expectation of failing out in the mid-upper teens. Either way, you can’t count on doing the set in less than an hour at your current speed. You can work on ingraining the right pace, though, with shorter sets. Whether you do 100’s, 150’s or 200’s, they need to be evenly split. Doing a 150 targeting 2:40 at 52/53/55 by 50 isn’t gonna help you. Do you have a 1650 time to work with? If not, you can extrapolate from your 500 pace (110% is a reasonable guess), and work on ingraining that pace. You can then drop your 1650 training pace without the usual “set accomplished before failure” cue by adjusting it proportionally to any changes in your 500 pace.
-Even though you’re not targeting sprint events, I think there’d be value for you in doing some sets of 25’s at 100 race pace. Knowing how to keep your stroke together at higher turnover rates can help you close out a 500 stronger. It’s also something you can go to when you have ~15 minutes left in a practice and you want to do something productive.
-Consider some other stroke sets to compliment your freestyle training. The muscle groups recruited for breaststroke, in particular, are quite different than those recruited for freestyle. When the muscle groups you need for freestyle are too shot to do any more productive freestyle work, but you want to do something to continue building your general aerobic capacity, pull out a breaststroke set. A potential byproduct is that you might actually get good at breaststroke!
-My progression curve really started to flatten out after about 4-5 months of 4-5 ~1 hour workouts a week. The gains in my main races (100, 200, 400/500 free) have been small and infrequent. I started to get frustrated, but decided to diversify instead. I’m working on 1000, 1650, even 2 mile stuff now. I’m doing some 100 and 200 breaststroke sets. I even spent ~6 weeks working on the 50 fly and swam it at Masters State. I’m finding the gains in the other places are keeping me motivated even when I don’t see much progress in the “main” events.
-One area that’s hard, if not impossible, to self coach with USRPT is technique. I do a “traditional” workout a week with the local masters team, just to get some regular technique feedback. I’d recommend you consider doing the same if you’re not already.
If you wait until they can complete all 30 of a set. You will be waiting a very long time.or your speed is too slow. You reach a point of diminishing returns and it’s better to adjust pace once they can achieve X number.”
I agree. I’ve learned for myself as a self-coached masters swimmer that staying at a particular interval until the offered number is achieved is not efficient (I offer myself 20 for my 25s, 50s and 75s). Adaptation to a new pace is very high for about 4 weeks or so, then it drastically plummets. I’ve altered my training such that I wait until I feel that the “new pace adaptation” has faded which usually coincides with about 7 intervals before first failure (about 4 weeks or so), then introduce a faster pace at that point. I’ll do this two times at which time I’ll drop back to the original pace and attempt my offered number (20). I always sail through them. The question is: Am I ahead of the game doing this? According my my training data, I am. Exposing myself to a faster pace earlier keeps me at a high level of adaptation for a longer period. What’s interesting is that although swimming to failure causes adaptation, it has a limited affect on adaptation when the body has gotten used to a particular pace. Forcing a new pace is like throwing a monkey wrench into the gears. It obliterates everything and creates a level of adaptation that swimming to failure can’t match on its own.
I’m curious how your race times correlate.
Example: 200 fly 1:42.87 final time (1st place, conference and meet record)
N x 50 on 2:00, 23.45 training pace (race split 23.05)
N x 50 on 1:00, 26.66 training pace (race split is average of 2, 3, & 4, 26.61 with a stdev of .23) I would project his splits from 26.58 (avg-stdev) to 26.84 (avg+stdev).I have a few questions.
Are you specifically training the opening 50 of a 200 different from 50’s # 2/3/4? If so, are those 50’s on 2 minutes off the blocks?
Your chart shows offered/made for the season, but how many repetitions are you offering in a single set?
When you say
I think what coaches need to do is find the interval that allows the swimmer to swim at RP for their event. It may mean that 25s on 1:00, or :50 and maybe even the :40 as long as it lines up with RP.
I assume there has to be some sort of volume objective there. I can swim 25’s at 100 race pace on :40 for a while before I fatigue and fail. I can do it for a longer while at :50, and I assume (maybe not) even longer on 1:00. Or are you experimenting with interval and settling on the one that seems to be at the inflection point where more rest doesn’t really result in more successful completions?
Hey Nick,
There is much free info available here: http://coachsci.sdsu.edu/swim/usrpt/table.htm . I’ve been able to build a self-training program just by reading the bulletins there and watching a few of Dr. Rushall’s videos on youtube.
Spend some time going through the bulletins. Start with #28 to get some background on the concept. # 39 goes in more depth. #47 is the nuts and bolts of creating a training plan.
First and foremost, you’ll need to gain an understand the concept of “failure” in the context of USRPT, what you do when you fail to make a targeted pace in a set, and what to do when you do complete a set. The biggest thing to come away with is that training to failure is good, and that while completing a set is good because it indicates you’ve mastered that pace, it also means you’re ready to increase the pace to something that you will fail at. It’s a bit of a different mind-set than the typical swimmer’s mentality where “failure” is seen as a bad thing.
Long story short, you’ll be doing lots of 25’s on 15 seconds rest. You’ll “offer” yourself 30 opportunities each, but shouldn’t usually make them all.
With a 1:05.6 best 100 back, you’ll probably want to start with a target time of :17.
With a best 100 free time of :58.3, you’ll probably start with a target time of :15
Your fly seems a little slow compared to your back and free. You need to work with your coach to make sure you have proper form before you start pressing hard on that stroke with USRPT sets. If your form is OK and you just need to work up your stamina, you’ll probably want to start with a target time of :18.
USPRT is very mental, too. Take whatever stroke advice your coaches have given you, and concentrate on making those corrections to your technique at actual race pace. Given that most of your speed sets will be 25s, you’ll also need to add time to work on turns.
Best of luck to you.
Oh, and congrats to billratio. You sound a little disappointed, but you really brought that team a long way in a year. You’re obviously on the right track, and will, with experience, hone in on the fine details that will take the team to the next level.
This will probably not go over well on this website. But I will say it any way. Be very careful of input from master’s swimmers. An “n” of one is not very reliable.
As one of the masters who give input, I would agree wholeheartedly. My “n=1” results should be taken with a grain of salt; as one data point that must be considered against many others.
What we self-coached masters are uniquely positioned to provide, however, is first-hand feedback from the swimmer’s perspective. As a coach, your expectations of what should happen, whether it’s with a single set or a season long program, are not always the same as what your swimmers expectations are. Your level of motivation as a coach may not align with the motivation of the athlete at that moment. Expectations and motivation have a significant impact on the actual outcome. As a self-coached swimmer, there’s no disconnect between the expectations and motivation level of coach and athlete. When results don’t meet expectations, you can disregard the expectation and motivation variables. Instead, you have to conclude that the expectations were not appropriate for the athlete at that time, and consider either a new plan, or new expectations for the same plan, in the future.
I’ll let her know she doesn’t need to go crazy on the last 50 if she’s winning her heat.
Pre-arranged signal using the lap counter? You watch the splits, decide whether she can hold steady or needs to go for it on the last 50. Relay that info (verbally if you’re close, by signal if you’re farther away) to the lap counter who lets her know with a left-right, or up-down, at the 425 mark.
My 500 swimmer I am still unsure about. You don’t think swimming a 500 all out on back to back days is going to hurt her a little at finals? Doc, you would still have a distance swimmer go all out at prelims if she was a near lock for top 8?
Billratio,
If it were me and I did that type of strategy I’d have them swim no slower than 3% of LTB in prelims as a target time.
I don’t think I’d even hold her back that much, really. I’d want to see ~the same swim both days to the 400y mark, but have her hold that pace steady to the finish in prelims while unleashing her to close faster in the finals. I would hope to see new LTB’s both days, with day 2 being 2-3 seconds faster. 2-3 seconds doesn’t sound like a lot of difference, but there’s a big difference in the fatigue factor between cruising to a finish and sprinting to the finish.
I’d look at the total workload of the individual swimmer. Are we talking someone who will be tapped to swim 300 yards or less on finals day? If so, I’d say “go for it” in prelims. If we’re talking someone who’s gonna swim a 200, the 500, and maybe a 100 leg on a relay, I’d coach them hold back a touch in prelims if I were confident they could still make the A Final.
As for the relay, I’d lean towards getting as many people the experience as possible while still having a high certainty of transferring to the A final.
I did an 8 day “unloading” for USMS Summer Nationals. I gradually reduced the number of offered reps while simultaneously increasing the rest between reps. 4 days out I started working on replicating actual race strategy. For the 400 free, that meant 400’s broken by 50’s, trying to hit the anticipated splits on each 50 ( i.e., first, second, and last 50 faster than the regular USRPT “target time.”) I did this 3x 4 days out, 2x 3 days out, 1x 2 days out. For the 100 free, I did similar race simulations broken by 25 on days T- 4, 3, and 2. Last day was just a warm-up and 4×50 build.
Went 18 seconds faster in the 400 than I did unrested 6 weeks before, almost 7 seconds faster than a converted 500 SCY time I swam after a 3-day rest 5 months prior. Didn’t really have a good comparison baseline for the 100, but my time converted to 55.76 SCY which correlated well to my typical USRPT set target time of 14.00/25 yards on 15 seconds rest. I also dropped 1.65 seconds in the 50 free, something I did almost no specific training for, although the baseline was at a meet where I’d already swam the 200 and 500 free same day, while at Nationals the 50 was the only event on my schedule that day.
That terrible 400 I swam 6 weeks prior convinced me that I needed more unloading than the the 3 day protocol. I was just beat; couldn’t hold pace even though I could see my splits on the scoreboard every 100 meters and knew while I was swimming that I wasn’t close to my expected time. I was also regressing in the number of made reps of 75’s and 50’s at 400 race pace in practice. Undoubtedly, there was some accumulated fatigue, despite the suggestion that USRPT keeps you fresh all the time. To be fair, I probably didn’t diversify my training enough, doing a 400 free set almost every practice, and not including any alternative stroke work.
