Marlin

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  • in reply to: Questions about implementing USRPT. #3344
    Marlin
    Participant

    I’m 30 and have been doing race pace for 3.5 years. I’ve had some breaks from training here and there but I have been pretty consistent and have tried a lot of different things. I did alright with the 25’s and three fails method but I really struggled with the suggested 15 seconds rest. I had to do it on longer rest but I had good race correlation with that. The 25 practice pace lines up with the last lap of the 100 adjusted for turn time. So if you train on 17, the last lap of your 100 should be a 17 when your feet leave the wall off of the last turn. Completing 30 reps on your race pace is really good and would no doubt correlate to the race. 30 reps is probably over kill, 20 reps correlated just fine, at least for me anyway.

    Breaststroke is tricky to train. Free and fly seem to be more consistent and more predictable going into a meet. Breaststroke is all over the place for me. Heading into last fall, I put most of my focus on breast in training because I wanted to drop my times but I ended up adding time. My fly times were fantastic though so it wasn’t like I was out of shape or not recovered enough. Sometimes doing more isn’t the answer. I kept it race pace and didn’t do anything slow just to get more yardage in but I was training breast more days out of the week than I had been. I was also doing more sprints for breast which I think messed me up. My best 50 breast times have come from when I was doing limited sprints in practice. It’s weird but that’s how it’s worked for me over the years. However I need to train sprints for free and fly to have my best performances.

    Going into my fall meet my best times in the 50 and 100 yard breast were 27.57/1:01.56 and I ended up going 27.68/1:03.65. I probably could have been a 102 but I knew I was adding a lot of time and that made me die even harder at the end. With the 101 I was doing longer stuff and shorter stuff with the 103 so I decided to shift back to longer rp stuff after flopping with the shorter stuff. When I did the 1:01.56, I was doing 75’s on 10 minutes a couple times a week; usually 3 reps. I would swim it like the first 75 of the 100, going out hard but not sprinting at the end and leaving a little in the tank if I had another 25 to go, just like the way you swim a 100.

    Since longer stuff works better for me, I figured I’d take it to the extreme and just swim 100’s for time and see what happens. I’m a masters swimmer and have nothing to lose if it doesn’t work out. I like trying different things in training so I figured I’d give it a shot. Originally, I was going to try to do it 4 days a week because I was going to try to mimic the Bulgarian method which is for weight lifting. Basically you max out every day which is incredibly difficult but eventually your body adapts and it produces really fast increases in strength after adaptation. I tried, but I couldn’t do it. It was hard doing 100’s on back to back days so I ended up doing it 2 times per week. I train in scm and did these form a push. I would do like a meet warm up beforehand. It was rough at first. My best scm time is 109.4 and I was going 117’s at first but I worked my way down to a 113.5. I also did a little bit of sprinting but only once a week and only 1 or 2 25’s at full rest just to keep the technique fresh. It was more of a confidence booster than anything else because my speed didn’t get worse and it reassured me that my 50 would still be ok even though I wasn’t sprinting much. At my meet a couple of weeks ago, my times were 27.00 and 1:01.20. I should have been under 101 because I didn’t do any turns in warm up and my foot slipped pretty bad on the first turn. It was the first time I had been under 33.0 on the second 50 which I was pretty happy about. Also, I was really surprised by my 50. Knocking off .57 was unexpected and I’m pumped about it, although I wish I was .01 faster.

    You can get faster on limited training, especially with breaststroke. Steve West is the oldest guy to ever qualify for Olympic trials at the age of 40 I believe. It was in the 100 breast. There was an interview, I think it was swimming world mornining show, but he said he only trained 4 days a week when he qualified. The screamingviking is in his 40’s and almost went a lifetime best in the 100 breast training with USRPT on a very limited training schedule. He did by the book USRPT but he also would push a 100 or 200 for time after his set. That was another reason why I decided to just do 100’s for time instead of repeats sets. Both of these guys have great 200’s as well so it is possible to swim fast and get better on limited training.

    in reply to: Dry-land Training #3320
    Marlin
    Participant

    Speaking of biomechanics, body type, and that sort of thing, I had a revelation the other night. I have been putting more of an emphasis on turns and underwaters this past season because that is a weakness for me. A couple of months ago I swam in a meet where there were 25’s and I noticed that one person that I was even with in a 25 breast, I was getting beat by over half a second in the 50 in the same meet. I got on and off the wall fast and my pullout felt fine so it didn’t really make sense why I was losing so much ground on the second 25 because I closed with good speed. If my pullout on the start is even why do I get destroyed on the pullout off the wall?

    I think it’s not even the pullout it’s self, but the initial push power off the wall. A long time ago, when I used to lift, I had a horrible squat. It’s because of my body type. I have a longer femur which forces me to lean forward more to hold my center of gravity. You can read more about it here https://www.boxrox.com/how-femur-length-affects-squat-mechanics/ . Squats just don’t work for my body type and I hated them. It occurred to me at practice the other night that femur tibia ratio affects your posture as you push off of the wall. I have always struggled with this too, it doesn’t really feel natural. If you think of a flip turn like you are sitting in a chair on the wall, you don’t want your feet too far away from the plane of where your streamlined arms are pointed. The longer your femur is than your tibula, the further your feet are going to be away from that plane unless you get in some weird angle. If you try to get your feet in the same plane it will force your torso away from horizontal to the bottom. This will create a less powerful push off. I can only glide 10 meters off of the wall even in the tightest streamline possible but I think it has more to do with push off power than a bad streamline. I get on and off the wall quick, so clearly I am losing ground from 25-30. My scm vs lcm times in the 50 breast and fly are 30.92/31.19 and 25.91/25.92 so, clearly I am terrible off of the wall. The scm times should be faster.

    I looked at a lot of pictures of elite swimmers who have a big discrepancy between sc and lc and pretty much all of the swimmers who are way better in lc vs sc all have longer femur and shorter tibias. People like Adam Peaty, Sarah Sjostrom, and some are really obvious like Missy Franklin. There are others too. I was watching Peaty’s sc 100 breast https://www.floswimming.com/video/6060634-watch-adam-peaty-cracks-100m-breast-euro-record-with-5594 and he just gets destroyed off of the walls. His start is bad too and a lot of people say it’s his streamline but I also think it has to do with the push power off of the wall. Due to the angles of his legs, he doesn’t get as much power as the other swimmers and you can see him losing ground immediately off the wall.

    Swimmers with shorter femur to tibia ratio are better off of the walls. They talk all the time about Michael Phelps having a long torso and smaller legs all the time. It’s no so much the length but the ratio of the legs bones. You can be huge like Matt Grevers and have a normal ratio so I’m not saying the longer legs the worse it is.

    I also think the femur to tibia ratio has a big impact on underwater fly kicks. All of the swimmers with freakish underwaters have a lower than avg femur to tibia ratio. For some reason, the angle of the legs seem to be more powerful with a shorter ratio. People like Phelps, Lochte, Dressle all have lower than avg and some seem to be on the extreme end like Shields and Hoffer. Ratios and angles make a difference. Two swimmers that are the same height and weight can have completely different body types.

    in reply to: Swimmer Gone Rogue #3261
    Marlin
    Participant

    I’m a masters swimmer but I do swim on my own. The best advice I can give is to not swim reps at a slower pace just because you want to do more. It’s easy to fall into the mentality of “that rep was off the pace but I can get back on, on the next one” then you proceed to repeat reps at a slower pace and not get back on race pace like you thought you could. Doing this will hurt you in the end. When I started race pace training, I found it hard and frustrating to walk away when I had a bad day. But I can do it now no problem. You just have to accept it, come back fresh the next day, and have a good practice.

    For self timing, I use a sportcount finger stopwatch. It works pretty good and it’s nice to have a real time instead of trying to judge by the digital pace clock. https://www.sportcount.com/products.php?category_id=1 I use the yellow one.

    in reply to: additional thoughts on weight training for swimming #3234
    Marlin
    Participant

    It’s possible that weight lifting is a placebo when it comes to swimming faster. Weight lifting might make swimmers faster not from some physiological effect but simply from the belief that they will go faster because of the weights. But if weights make you faster, does it matter if it’s all in your head?

    The placebo effect is very strong in sports. Athletes can lift more, run faster, or have more energy, instantly upon receiving a placebo. If the athletes believes that they will improve, then they will.

    This is a very interesting study done with national level power http://fitnessforlife.org/AcuCustom/Sitename/Documents/DocumentItem/1907.pdf They took 11 power lifers and told them that they were receiving a fast acting steroid and then measured 1 rep max on bench, deadlift, and squat. All 11 hit lifetime best in every lift. A lot of them had significant gains up to 15 kg. That’s tough to do when you are already at a high level. One week later there was a second trail. They told 5 of the participants, guess what? you got a placebo and the increase in your max, you did all by yourself with no aid. The other 6, they gave the placebo pills again and all 6 were able to maintain the high level of increase in their 1rm. The 5 that knew that they got the placebo before were back to their original or slightly above their original 1rm. Although belief that you will improve absolutely makes a difference, it is such an abstract thing. The 5 powerlifters that knew that they got the placebo, lifted heavier on their own, so why couldn’t they do it again? There is no better way to believe something than seeing or doing it yourself. These lifters had proof that they could lift heavier because they actually did it. But when it came time to do it again, they couldn’t do it.

    This is another placebo study done with runners. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25412293 The runners performed a 3km race and were given an injection that they were told was “OxyRXB” but it was really just saline water. They improved by 1.2% which is pretty significant. That could improve your placing quite a bit in a 10 or 15 minute race.

    There’s no doubt that the placebo can improve performance. When it comes to something unproven like the effects of weights and swimming, if there are improvements from the weight room to the water, it’s hard to measure if they are physical, mental, or a little bit of both. Instead of designing a study that measures swimmers times in the water after going through a weight program, maybe a better study would be having swimmers who have been lifting for a while totally drop the weights and then see what happens to their times in the pool. Would they slow down or stay the same? Even then, it could be psychological if the swimmer thinks they have to lift to be fast. They may slow down if they have that mind set.

    But to answer the question of “what now” after going through a strength program. I guess the best thing to do is motivate the swimmer into believing that they will improve because of the increase in their strength. Keep doing the race pace sets and tell the swimmer that they are going to start to improving their race pace sets now and hopefully they actually do.

    in reply to: Thoughts on wt. trng #3223
    Marlin
    Participant

    I’ve read a lot of track stuff. It’s funny that they disagree on some training philosophies too. Not as bad as swimming though. One thing that pretty much all track people agree on is that the base for a 400 and under is speed. The 400 is most similar to the 100 in swimming. Some people in swimming still believe in that an aerobic base is the most important thing for the 100.

    In track, all of the best 400 runners are better at the 200 than the 800. There are guys that come up from the 200 to run the 400 but nobody comes down from the 800 to win a major 400 competition. Primary 800 runners do not have the speed reserve to hang with sprinters. Although there is an aerobic component to the 400 and 800 runners have much greater aerobic capacity, it is not enough to close the gap. If you have 2 runners who’s best 200 times are 19.5 and 21.0 and they both take out the 400 in a 21.5, the 19.5 guy takes far less effort than the 21.0 runner and will have much more in the tank to bring it home. And if the 21.0 guy takes it out in 23.0 then he is too far behind to catch up. 800 runners simply don’t have the speed to hang with sprinters in the 400 even if they have insane aerobic capacity and don’t fade at all on the back half.

    The 800 is like the 200 in swimming. There has been a shift in swimming where less people are doubling in the 100 and 200. Some people can do it like murphy. But look at people like Schooling, Peaty, and Sjostrom. Primary 200 swimmers have no chance to challenge them because they don’t have enough speed reserve. It’s particularly obvious in freestyle. Sun yang has a mountain of aerobic capacity and can put in a good 100 but he’s not going to win a major 100 completion unless he can get more top end speed.

    Ability to maintain speed is still important. Holding speed or slowing down at a slower rate is called speed endurance. The former wr holder in the track 200 and 400, Michael Johnson, had some of the best speed endurance ever. He still has the fastest second 100 of the 200 ever (including Usain Bolt) and the fastest last 100 of the 400. He no longer owns those world records because the 2 people that broke those records had enough speed reserve to overcome Michael Johnsons near perfect speed endurance. If there is one thing I took away from reading track stuff it is “You can’t maintain speed that you don’t have.” This is obvious but people tend to overlook this. I remember Matt Grevers saying in the year leading up to trails that he needed to make his 200 better to help his 100. If you look at his best 50 back and his second 50 of his 100, he already had great speed endurance. He needed more speed reserve to get better, not more aerobic work.

    The point I wanted to get to though is that weight lifting will do nothing for speed endurance. In the 100 breast Peaty has a 4.1 gap between his best 50 sprint and his second 50 of the 100. This is really good speed endurance. Michael Andrew is also around the 4.1. Peaty is a weight room freak and MA doesn’t lift. Van der Burgh was another big weight room guy but he could only get into the mid 4’s along with a lot of other people that lift like Kevin Cordes. Weight lifting and strength has nothing to do with holding your speed and will not improve your speed endurance.

    I’m not trying to use MA as the sole example, it’s just someone who everyone knows doesn’t lift and since most elites lift, it was hard to come up with an example. But if you look at Juniors nationals or any high level junior meet and look at the gap between 50 sprint times and the second 50 of the 100, there are lots of kids with great speed endurance. People who don’t lift can hold their speed just as well as the people who lift. Looking at the data, it’s pretty clear that lifting doesn’t give you an advantage in speed endurance.

    After about 5-7 seconds into the race you are already leaving the power system and moving into speed endurance. The real question is, does weight lifting help you obtain a higher speed in an allout 5-7 second swim. If your speed is better than that is going to allow you to have the potential for a better back half because of more speed reserve.

    The thing is, most track sprinters lift. Explosiveness and quickness are the essence of speed and that is what sprinters are looking to achieve in the weight room, not necessarily strength. They say a powerlifting coach would ruin a track sprinter real quick. There is a right and wrong way to do it. I feel like a right way to develop explosiveness with weights to hit a higher top end speed in swimming could be developed.

    in reply to: Thoughts on wt. trng #3215
    Marlin
    Participant

    I know that there are plenty of swimmers out there that improved in the weight room but didn’t translate it into the pool. I understand that the movements aren’t the same and may not match the neuromuscular patterning of swimming. The more I think about it, the more it doesn’t make sense to me why improvements in the weight room don’t translate to faster swimming.

    When kids hit puberty, they grow taller which helps swimming but they also get stronger. They can plateau in height but then start to fill out and keep gaining strength. They can neglect making technical changes and still drop time just from getting stronger.

    Men are naturally stronger than women. They are also taller on average which is an advantage in swimming but if you look at women’s elite sprinters vs. men the same height or shorter, the men still have the advantage. Men on average have a higher vertical leap than women which helps the start and 15m time. Take the time from 15-50 meters or a 100 minus the start and turn, there are still loads of men that are shorter than elite females that are faster. It’s not like men always have better technique, some of them have worse technique and are still faster. If it’s not size and not technique, it seems that the limiting factor is strength. Wouldn’t it be?

    If you take steroids and make 0 technical changes, you will probably still get faster from getting stronger.

    I’m not really advocating either way for weight lifting. I just don’t understand why getting stronger won’t help. Why can’t you get stronger in the weight room, then form new neuromuscular patterns in the pool with those stronger muscles and become faster. And if weight lifting does improve swimming, why does it work for some but not others?

    in reply to: Thoughts on wt. trng #3213
    Marlin
    Participant

    Strength in swimming is something that I have been thinking about a lot recently. I think strength plays a role but not as big as people think, especially upper body strength.

    Here is a good way to visualize it. Say there are two 50 freestylers that go the same time, are the same height and weight, and have the same identical pull, catch, and acceleration though the pull. Let’s just say that from the beginning of the pull to the end is .5 seconds with and identical acceleration though the pull. Since they are the same size and have the same pull time and acceleration, they are producing the same amount of force. You don’t need to know which swimmer is stronger in the weight room to figure out the force here.

    Using the same two swimmers above, let’s say that over the next season, swimmer B decides to hit the weight room super hard because he wants to get faster and swimmer A doesn’t improve his weight lifting numbers at all in the next season. Swimmer B adds 80 pounds to his bench, can do weighted pull ups with 3 45 pound plates, and do heavy overhead press. He can now bench 285 and swimmer A can only bench 185 and do less on weighted pull ups and overhead press. At the championship meet they both pull at .5 seconds with the same catch and acceleration. The pull force is the same. Swimmer B is a lot stronger, but how is he going to go faster if he is pulling with the same catch and acceleration? An identical technique with the same pull time and acceleration is the same amount of force whether you can bench 100 pounds or 500 pounds.

    If you look at a men’s elite 50 meter race. It really comes down to technique because they are all pulling at really close to the same speed. Anthony Ervin probably can’t lift as much as Flourant Manaudou or Josh Schneider.

    It’s the same on the women’s side. The strongest girl doesn’t always win. Penny Oleksiak before Rio could only do like 3 pull ups. Allison Schmitt could barely do 1 when she set the 200 free textile WR.

    I don’t know if weight lifting is totally worthless though. I think an increase in core and leg strength in the weight room may transfer to the pool. A lot of kids don’t lift in high school and in college when they start lifting they get better at everything but it seems like the get a lot better at the leg dominant activities: starts, underwaters, and breaststroke. You can definitely do things in the weight room to improve vertical leap which will in turn help your start. If you look at Dressel’s high school 18.9 vs 18.2 now, a good chunk of that time drop has coming from a better start and under waters. His surface speed has improved but it’s possible that his kick is stronger which gets him higher in the water giving him more buoyancy.

    There was a picture somewhere of Will Licon squatting some crazy amount this past year. He dropped a ton of time from high school until the end of college and I feel like strength had to have played a factor. It had to be more than just better technique and endurance.

    A lot of the weight lifting for swimming studies are so broad and not well designed. I’d like to see some more specific and isolated studies like only lifting legs only vs people doing lower and upper body. Or just doing weighted pull up’s and seeing if there is a correlation in swimming pull force as the swimmers max weighted pull up increases.

    in reply to: Race based training vs usrpt #3151
    Marlin
    Participant

    Flyingboy,

    Going a pb in practice is awfully difficult. But if they can do it, I don’t think it would hurt to do every once in a while. It would be a good confidence booster if nothing else. It seems like traditional distance training swimmers need rest to go a pb but I wouldn’t say it’s impossible. Chad le Clos used to do 10,000 meter practices in between prelims and finals at the world cup meets. He would still throw down some nasty times not that far off from his pb and get better week to week leading up to world champs. Perhaps he should have raced more leading up to the Olympics. Idk it’s hard to say if it would have made a difference.

    I have tried to go pb’s in practice in 100’s. Even if I do a proper warm up and then do the 100 first thing, I still have no chance of going a pb. I have trouble hitting the first 50 speed without any rest. If I really push it to get out as fast as I need to, it doesn’t end well.

    One thing I like to do for fun every once in a while is a 75 from a push trying to hit the pace of the last 75 race speed of a 100. I can hit this in practice. Since it’s an odd ball distance and only swum in practice, there is always a chance to go a pb.

    Maybe you could try 75’s for 100’s and 150’s for 200’s and see what you get.

    in reply to: Season results #3112
    Marlin
    Participant

    I tried some 12.5’s and 15’s on 7.60 and 9.12 with the tempo trainer the other day. I didn’t do them on any kind of interval, I was just trying to get used to accurately determining my distance traveled when the beep went off. It’s a little tricky, but I think I got it down pretty good now. 7.6 and 9.12 put me right at 12.5 and 15. What kind of interval am I supposed to do these on?

    in reply to: Challenging Coaching Dogma #3111
    Marlin
    Participant

    That’s some dramatic improvement across a wide variety of events. Nice work!

    in reply to: for those that have distance swimmers #3079
    Marlin
    Participant

    I think the same thing can be said for endurance in the 100. To swim a faster back half of the 100 sometimes the answer isn’t more endurance, it’s more speed. A while ago, I tried to figure out a generic formula of what you should be holding in your 25 100 pace stuff based on your top speed. For example if my sprint time in a 25 meter free was 12.2, I wanted to know what pace I should be holding doing 25’s on 15-25 rest. I figured there had to be some kind of a range with more primary 200 swimmers would hold a pace closer to their top speed than a drop dead 50 guy. I can’t remember exactly what the range was, plus it was kind of hard to calculate, but I believe I hypothesized that the range was 1.0-1.5 slower than your best rested all out 25 from a push is what you should be able to hold. That could be off a little. But to illustrate a point, whether you are Katie Ledecky or an average age group swimmer you are going to reach a point where it is unreasonable to expect to hold a pace that is close to your top speed. Even if you have the best endurance in the world you are not going to be able to hold something like .5 off of you top speed with 15 seconds rest for any significant amount of reps. Eventually there comes a point where you have to improve your top speed in order to improve your end of race speed. When I was doing 25’s, I hit the wall at 13.5 on freestyle but I just kept going thinking my endurance would improve but I stayed stuck for a while. I thought that in order to go below 13.5, I would have to bring my 12.2 sprint time down.

    I do 50’s on 2:00 now and I have been looking at back half splits in relation to top speed 50 times to figure out where I should be. I am not setting my pace based on this, I am using current back 50 tt as my pace. My back half of my 100’s are not where they should be based on my 50 times. For example my back 50 of my 100 breast is 6 seconds off of my top 50 breast time. It should be in the 3.5-4.5 range. In my case, the answer is more endurance but for someone who is 3.5 or less off of their 50 time, they have to improve their top speed in order to swim a faster 100. They could improve technique and turns but from a physical standpoint, all the aerobic training in the world is not going to make you go below 3-3.5 off of your 50 time.

    It pays to have as much speed in the tank as possible. Look at Sarah Sjostrom. She had the fastest back half in the 100 fly in the field. She went 29.47 and was the only person under 30 except for the Chinese girl that tested positive. Beating the field by over a half second on the second 50 is total domination. But if you look at the 100 free, she had a good back half, not the best though. Why is that? She was the best 200 swimmer in the field. She even had a slightly better second 100 of the 200 than Ledecky. So Sjostrom definitely has endurance. She is great at both fly and free, but clearly better at fry. At the same time it would make sense for her to be a little faster on the second 50 of a 100 free based on her crazy back 50 on fly and the endurance to swim a great 200 free. The difference is that she has so much more power and top speed in fly relative to the competition than free. On fly, she was +5 on her back 50 over her top 50 time. Oleksiak was about +4.6. So even though Sjostrom blew away the field, does that really mean she has the best endurance?

    Another thing that stuck out to me looking at the splits at the Olympics was Kyle Chalmers 100 free. Going 24.4 on the back half when your top 50 free time is 22 low is just absurd. He didn’t swim the 50 at the Olympics but maybe he could have gone 21.9 at best. But if you take away the benefit of the block and adjust for turn time he is not that far off top speed throughout the second half. That’s endurance if I have ever seen it. It is impressive for a muscular guy who split time between sports. He doesn’t have as much yardage under his belt as other swimmers who have been swimming year round their whole lives. So much for the aerobic base. But for Chalmers moving forward if his 22 low 50 doesn’t come down, I don’t see any way his going to go better than 47.5. Even though the 50 and end of a 100 are using completely different energy systems, top speed makes a difference. Your gap is only going to be but so much. So the only way Chalmers can drop his 100 is to get more top end speed.

    In yards the gap for 100 free is around 2-3.5 with most people around the 3 second range. Dressel was +3.0 on his ncaa record and everyone else was around the same gap. So even though Dressel blew everyone away on both the first and second half, it doesn’t really mean he has better endurance. Endurance should be measured by the gap between top 50 speed and back 50 speed not the difference between first and second 50’s. I hope that makes sense, I’m kind of rambling on at this point. Your second 50 is only going to be but so slow. Vlad Morozov had probably the worst race plan ever at 2013 Worlds going out in 21.9 but he was still able to make it back in 26.0. That won’t win you any races but that’s still not that bad considering how fast he took it out. Even with no aerobic training your gap is only going to be 5.0 at the worst. Erik Risolovato focuses mostly on the 50 and has done mostly speed work over the past couple of years. I don’t know all the details about his training but I know he does very little aerobic or back half 100 pace work and he was still able to go +4.5 on a 100 yard free and go a really fast time.

    I think different swimmers are somewhat predetermined to fall on different places on the endurance scale. For example, if you could go back in time and change Anthony Ervin’s training, he was never going to be a monster back half guy in any program. On the other hand, Phelps was never going to be a speed demon, lead a 100 wire to wire type of guy like Schooling. The goal for training for 100’s should be to improve your top speed as much as possible while not sacrificing any time on your top 50 time/back 50 of 100 gap. And I don’t think it takes a huge amount of yardage to maintain the gap.

    in reply to: Issue is Progression #3067
    Marlin
    Participant

    How did your season turn out? What do you think the impact was of making the swimmers do all the offered reps instead of the failure method? I’m interested to find out if the pace that they were supposed to hit correlated to race time even though they went past failure.

    Marlin
    Participant

    400 IM 4:38.61- 27.11 31.43 36.76 36.10 39.36 38.96 34.80 34.09

    200 fly 2:06.91- 26.83 30.73 33.71 35.64

    200 breast 2:21.77- 31.75 35.93 36.86 37.23

    200 back 2:06.81- 29.55 31.41 32.97 32.88

    Marlin
    Participant

    I thought he did really well at trials also. I thought his 200 IM was incredible because he said in an interview that he didn’t do any 200 IM training leading up to trials. They put most of the focus on 100 breast which was smart because that was his best chance. It’s incredible that he did so well in the 200 IM without training for it.

    As for training for longer events, you may get your wish. MA swam the 400IM long course in a meet yesterday. A lot of people are calling for him to start to narrow it down, but I think he should keep swimming a lot of events and keep his options open. Then when world champs trials, Olympic trials are a few months away, put all the focus on the best 2 or 3 events. I think this is kind of what they did with this years trials, and I think it’s a good plan.

    I’d like to see him start doing the 200 free on a regular basis to help his IM. And I think he should revamp his stroke technique. His 50 is good but the 100 and up it is clearly his worst technical stroke. I don’t think it’s a matter of getting sloppy at the end of the race either. His technique is exactly what he practices. I had his freestyle technique video. Also, if he brings his dolphin kicks up to the level of the top flyers and backstrokers, he is going to be an absolute freak.

    in reply to: Just like I thought… #3028
    Marlin
    Participant

    Doc,

    I have been trying some of your sets over the past month and like them a lot. I started doing freestyle nx25 at 60 and nx50 at 2:00. I really liked these sets so I decided to try the other strokes. I’ve done all four strokes of 25’s at 60 and nx50 at 2 br/fly/fr and back 50 of 100 IM br/fr. I feel like the 50’s at back half simulate the real race better than the Rushall sets. I was worried about being dead the next day after a 50 set but I’ve been able to improve day to day doing these sets. A few step backs here and there with built up fatigue but no more than when I was doing more of the Rushall sets. There is more lactate for sure but it’s not a problem. I also got to say hello to my old friend 200 beats per minutes but that was early on. It kind shocked my body at first but it’s adjusted now. If the 50’s simulate the real race better and I can hit race pace day after day, I may as well do the 50’s.

    I have been progressing nicely, especially in fly. On the 50’s at 2 minutes I started with my current best back 50- 31.13 converted to meters plus one for the tempo trainer push off delay = 35.52. My sets went like this- made 7 on the first then 7 again, and 8. Last night I decided to move the pace down one second to 34.52 (or 30.2 yard pace). I made 6 on the first try! And a lot of them were fast too. My times were about 32.5,32.5,33,33.5,33.5,34. I completely fell apart on 7 though and pulled up at 35 because my arms started catching the surface on recovery. But I feel like I have improved my power already. I have gotten in 5 fly’s nx25’s at 60 with 15.00 on the tempo trainer. The best I have done so far is 11. I think I’m almost ready to move the pace down on that. I’m going to try to make at least 12 next time.

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