Reply To: Roadblocks to Adoption
Good stuff oldschoolc. Several things come to mind.
“Arizona Swimming Gauchos” is a superb team name. Well done.
The link to the PDF worked. Awesome. Can you provide some insight into what’s behind the data? How many swimmers? Did you filter your athletes to remove those who are obviously invalid or poor data points? For example those who were hurt, sick, missed significant/critical training or trained completely improperly.
I hear you on getting the CNS torched and compromising water work. As far as I can tell that is Rushall’s point as well and I agree that sort of thing will happen. I do not see how this fact demands a yes/no decision about dryland (which I interchange equally with the term “strength training”). Rather I ask how much quality water work is acceptable to sacrifice for a given gain in strength? Or turning it around and accepting no dryland how do we address the implication that strength is not a major asset in swimming?
I’ve seen things similar to your sprinter a couple of times and, yes, there certainly is some level of mass gain that goes too far, but these are extremes. All other things being equal 6’4” 200 beats 6’4” 160, right? Now 6’4” 280 is probably much closer to Not Good. It boils down to extremes at either end that no coach would advocate as desirable and the range of what’s “best” is somewhere in between. Which implies that for a given swimmer too close to the extremes we should be shifting them toward a better range.
Come at this from what we see in the sport. Consider all the 6’4” Olympic/elite males out there. How many are under 200 pounds (~91 kilos for our non-US friends)? Would you believe even 25%? At the championship level – club, HS, college, national, world – do we see enough larger/stronger swimmers performing “better” to believe there is probably a lot of causation behind the correlation? We all have seen outliers who buck the trend, but nobody is arguing that size/strength are not, generally, a good thing, right?
In the end I’m looking for a more nuanced and/or more compelling framework for the prohibition against dryland in USRPT. This facet of the program is, in my experience, dismissed out of hand almost immediately by those who are learning about Dr. Rushall’s program. Right or wrong it points to the need for something different and/or more nuanced than: Don’t do it.
