Rob
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I am both a coach and a swimmer. I am in the midst of rehab for my own shoulder from a recent surgery, and had about 6 months of coaching experience with USRPT (20+ overall years in coaching). Once I get going again, it’s my intent to “eat my own dog food”, and train myself in the USRPT model. I expect to be very much in the minority when it comes to training in a masters environment and doing this much (or any) speed work. Masters swimmers in so many cases are opposed to this because it takes them way out of their comfort zone, and with many of the swimmers today being triathletes who want nothing but freestyle and yardage, I’m likely going to be reaching out to a few folks I know who I race against and see if we can come up with some kind of training group. Seeing what I have in USRPT from the kids I’ve trained, I cannot deny this does work, and much more so than the long-slow model. It’s a different mindset, which I love as well, but you gotta come to every practice with the intention of racing. I live for that… Especially after growing up in a model where if you’re not training more than the other guy, you’re going to be losing to them – to the tune of around 12-16K yards per day + weights + dryland. It’s no wonder I’m fighting with shoulder issues in my 40’s and get nauseous at the thought of swimming any repeat over 200 or a set more than 2000!!
From a coaching perspective, we called the USRPT sets the “bricks” and the warm-up/warm-down items the “mortar”, and during the season, we strive to see just how high of a wall we can build. While you are able to slightly vary the bricks you assign by number and stroke, there is an eventual limitation on truly original sets, assuming you stick with the Rushall guidelines (mixed methods = mixed results). I’ve prided myself on NEVER giving the same set twice (ever) with the only exception being periodic test sets. Now, when it comes to the mortar, we definitely leverage that to mix things up – drills, recovery, pull, kick, games, etc. We’ll see how it goes with my attention span of a gnat! I was just looking to see what others do to see if I may be able to augment what I do as well.
Energy is not a problem.. If you’ve ever seen Todd Schmitz (Missy’s coach), and his energy on deck, I like to think he got that from me when I was his coach
I’m a big practice cheerleader and highly interactive with mechanics, encouragement, & watch times. If I don’t leave a practice in a sweat, and a hoarse voice, I’ve left something out! Rob
I wouldn’t think any changes would be needed in USRPT because of the primary focus of USRPT to be able to allow for recovery workout to workout. With the additional time between water practices, this would seem to be assured. However, what is something to be mindful of is the additional work outside of the pool interfering with practice performances. Always keep focus on technique at race speeds. Dr. Rushall published a good paper on the pedagogy of stroke mechanics that you may want to investigate. You can slice-and-dice distances however you’d like. It’s all relative to what they can handle, and progressively increasing the amount of time/distance done at race speed. Do them relative to what they are capable of to start with, and this will manage itself, so long as you do not overdo it as you build this up. Be willing to stop or even regress a bit if you see issues, and keep track of what’s been done, so this can be quantitatively be measured. We never did anything in sense of a race-pace repeat, that was more than 75 meters (SCM) and had no issues even up to the 400/500 free.
Rob
No on both counts.. Because of the higher intensity of USRPT, body temp elevates, and without proper water temp, performances drop, and hence, defeats a primary motivator of USRPT. This added intensity won’t help the knee either… The lighter yardage might, but the negatives would seem to outweigh the positives in this case.
Rob
Yes… I’d say to even take out the racing component and allow for complete recovery on that day. Next day goes far better than feeling like you’ve just got to go fast every day. Some will not recover as fast as others, and you cannot keep trying to fit the square peg in a round hole. That often ends in disaster – mentally and physically. Their bodies will eventually recover faster and make those kinds of turnarounds, but for now, it sounds like you’d be best served by just working drills and starts or even just a fun day.
Rob
I’ve updated the charts to span wider time ranges, fixed a few bugs, as well as accounting for SCM > LCM, SCY > LCM, LCM > LCM. I added a table on the charts that dictates turn time removal if you’re going from short to long… Only open item is going from LCM race to SCY pace. The issue lies with the difference added by turns that have to be taken out of the time before the time is converted from meters to yards. This time for the turns varies by the stroke, and as such, complicates things to the point of needing a separate chart per stroke when going from LCM race > SCY pace. I’ll keep noodling on it, but in the mean time, hope this is of good use for everyone! New charts are at the same link, or attached to this note.
Rob
This is dictated by ‘evidence’. In USRPT training, if you cannot perform the set at the designated interval, this serves as the fail-safe of not performing when too fatigued and likely reinforcing bad mechanics in the name of making a time. Push to the point of failure and stop. We play it out where we have what we call “fail sets”, which means in our case that if you fail 3 times, the set ends for you. Example: 16 x 50’s on :50 and holding 200 pace (P200 with ~20 seconds of rest). We provide them with the time they need to hit and if they are more than .2 slow, that’s a failure. Goal is to make them all. A few do, many don’t.. Ultimately We build the number up to where many make it at that speed. Monthly/weekly meets serve to reset the goal. Mentally, it’s a switch.
Rob
