gsbelbin

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  • in reply to: Target time for 100Free LCM #3404
    gsbelbin
    Participant

    I think one of the most important parts of the meet warmup is timing the first stroke of the breakout. I always need to adjust to different pool depths. Both for the underwater kick depth and the visual relationship between the pool bottom and when I’m about to “breach” the surface.

    Oh, yes, there’s been a few times where I’ve been swimming in a deeper pool and tried to take my first fly stroke while still a foot below the surface!

    in reply to: Target time for 100Free LCM #3398
    gsbelbin
    Participant

    Forgive me if I’m stating the obvious, but is he having a very short warm-up immediately (10-15 mins) before he races? The guidance for race pace sets is that you are getting everything (heart rate, respiration etc) up to speed on the first 5 or 6 repeats. Training with USRPT has made a portion of the fast twitch fibres oxidative but if you try to swim fast immediately then you’re unable to deliver oxygen to the fibres quickly enough so they will perform anaerobically. Part way through the race the oxygen delivery will get up to speed but by then the damage is done and you suffer at the back end. I’ve found that swimming an easy 100 followed by 4×25 at race pace with about 15 seconds rest, 10-15 mins before the race works well. It also helps to get your body locked into the effort and pace that is expected in the race. If he doesn’t already do this it’s worth a try at meets that have the facilities. It works for me.

    in reply to: hard data of our last 8 weeks – poor results followed #3202
    gsbelbin
    Participant

    Great to see you’re recording all this data so that you can look back and make assessments like this. There’s a huge amount of info there but I’ll just ask a few questions and make a few points. Sorry if there’s anything I’ve misunderstood.

    What have you based your target times on? You say for instance that one swimmer’s PB is 1:10.45 but their target is 1:06. This is way too fast.
    In your spreadsheet there are a lot of 7s in the 1F column which again would suggest that the targets are too fast.
    Having said that, there are a lot where they have their first fail at 7 or 8 but then carry on to complete 27 or more. In my experience that doesn’t seem right. Once you’ve hit your first fail you can usually only manage another 4 to 6 until the next failure and then same again to the next.
    How long have you been using this program? Is it just these eight weeks or before that too?
    It looks like you have limited pool time so you’ve tried to spread the events out over the 8 weeks as best you can but this means inevitable compromises. I wonder if it would be better to reduce the number of events a little so that more time can be spent on those that are important to each swimmer.
    You make a comment about lactate build up. Again in my experience the aim of this training is to avoid excessive lactate build up since it ruins your stroke mechanics which has a huge effect on your speed. Training with the right target times and then swimming at that speed in the race will prevent this.
    I’d be interested to see the split times for these swimmers in their recent races to see how they compare with their training times.

    Hope this helps

    in reply to: 400 free set recovery question #2230
    gsbelbin
    Participant

    One question I would have is, what is she doing the rest of the time? What’s in the rest of those sessions where she does 30×50 and what does she do in other sessions? Personally I’ve found that including traditional training alongside USRPT can have a significant impact on a swimmer’s ability to hit their target times.

    Also, based on the rule of 20 seconds rest she should be going on 55 rather than 60. It may mean she doesn’t complete 30 reps but that’s the aim anyway.

    in reply to: Ran a little experiment #2174
    gsbelbin
    Participant

    Okay that makes more sense. In your example you’ve added the standard deviation of 0.44 to their race pace tarfet and they allow a further 0.05. They are counting a fail if they miss their race pace time by 0.49.

    in reply to: Ran a little experiment #2172
    gsbelbin
    Participant

    Oldschool, I’m surprised to hear that you are deciding what is and isn’t a make by such small margins (0.05). The aim of a USRPT set is to challenge the swimmer’s body to generate the forces to achieve race pace for as long as possible. I think Rushall talks about as many strokes as possible. If a swimmer’s time drops by only 0.05 or even 0.25 or more this could be down to any number of factors such as start time, turns, turbulence from other swimmers, timing of the finish etc. Plus the difference in forces required for two swims which are only 0.05 (or, say, 0.25) are minimal. So I think to count such a swim as a failure and allow the swimmer to miss a repeat is detrimental to the overall aim of the set. Surely it’s better to keep going until a clearer failure occurs. What a reasonable failure margin is, is open to debate but personally I know when I’ve reached the limit; there’s a definite cliff edge where my performance drops significantly.

    in reply to: More Supporting Evidence #2040
    gsbelbin
    Participant

    I only do 4 sessions a week with each session around 3000m. We tend to do quite long warm ups but the USRPT sets we do are as suggested in the Rushall bulletins except they are a little shorter at the moment. So for 100 race pace we’re doing 16×25 and for 200 race pace we’re only doing 12×50. The intention is to build these up to maybe 20 or 24×25 and 16 or 20×50. In a session the younger ones (age groupers) do 3 sets each on different strokes but I only do 2 sets. Rest intervals are as recommended (15 and 20). Prior to trying USRPT we were doing 2 hour sessions of between 5000m and 7000m consisting of the usual aerobic, theshold, lactate production and tolerance etc.

    in reply to: More Supporting Evidence #2036
    gsbelbin
    Participant

    Yes I should have mentioned that too. Both of us (being old!) are a bit cautious on the first half of 200s so we both took the first 50 very easy. My back was about 2 seconds slower than my target repeat time and the other guy was about 4 seconds faster on his freestyle. But For my back this was going really, really easy. The feeling I have is that USRPT allows you to go pretty fast taking it easy which then gives you more in reserve for the rest of the race. I also swam a 1.5 second PB on my 200 IM. My fly time was my fastest ever split by about a second despite consciously and deliberately taking it as easy as possible while still keeping my stroke turning over.

    in reply to: Katie Ledecky #1836
    gsbelbin
    Participant

    Here’s the link to the Bruce Gemmell interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY0tlX2hdJs.
    Here’s where she says he doesn’t do 800s in training https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbzCzxb7qps.
    And here’s another one with Katie where she also talks about race pace 100s, hitting 59s and the 58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d00awPIi840

Viewing 9 posts - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)