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I think you need to give her longer swims and less rest to be successful in LCM 400. Doing 50’s you can rely on wall speed to much and with the interval being 1:00 I think she is not learning how to maintain her speed.
I’m not saying 50’s aren’t good for the 400, but have the main staple be repeats of 75’s and even some 100’sI think it would be helpful but it wouldn’t be a replacement for the units. However I still think it would be valuable.
6102 I had a similar experience, as I imagine a bunch of people did, a while back. The good news is the units did arrive finally. I think they are a great idea but are not easy to implement into your program. Being that they cost $200+ most clubs can only afford 1 or 2 pairs.
So you have to make extra time and space to use them and only a couple kids can use them during one time.
Some of the stroke examples are very good and some I don’t like. All in all, if you have extra money and the ability to have a limited amount of swimmers use the pool at one time then you they are worth trying.Bill, I think the first girl you are referring to is on my team as well 🙂
You can definitely throw out her results. My general rule of thumb is unless a swimmer has at least
75-80% minimum attendance, then there is no way for me to really evaluate weather or not out training plan was effective.
Your second girl will be a good case study on her own. I think you might find that she does pretty well because even though she may have missed more practices than you like, she took full advantage of what you offered which was a lot of very “relevant” practice.
Good luck! Let us know how they did.First of all, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if your girls go in the mid to upper 30’s next time.
However, considering you are focusing on the 500 with the set rather than the 200, I would either bump their interval down to 45 for the last 10 or 15 and see how they do or see if they can hold that pace doing 75’s.Great job Cmejean!
Now about that .32 in the 200 Free…….. Just kidding. I sounds like a good weekend keep it up!
Some good questions there Swimin.
I think the USRPT world is doing itself a big disfavor, in a sense, by promoting itself so aggressively. Years and years of swimming training is now being discredited and in the name of supposed “evidence based, science based” training.
Now I believe in USRPT, and it has worked well for me for the most part, but there are a lot of swimmers swimming real well who are not doing USRPT, and a large enough sample base to suggest that they are doing something right. Something beyond just getting physically more mature, which is what the critics will point at being Michael Andrew’s main reason for success. I fear a lot of people are going to get discouraged when they find out that they are not all of a sudden way faster than all of the dinosaurs that are stuck in the “dogma of traditional training”.
Is Michael genetically special swimmer? Of course. Would he be swimming this well in a traditional program? No way of knowing. However, looking at what he has accomplished there is no way you can say that USRPT doesn’t work.
From what I have read, he doesn’t do 3 workouts per day very often and usually his workouts are about an hour in length so it is not like he is getting that much extra water time in.
Now let’s say for the point of argument that USRPT is the ultimate form of swim training, and in 20 years almost everyone is doing it. Then what? It will be the people who learn how to improve upon it that have the most success. I say this in response to the mixed training idea. I think the key is being able to insure that they are fresh enough to achieve as many swims at race pace as possible. If you can mix training styles and still allow that to happen I think you will be on to something.I would say absolutely. However, I would have them do it from a dive and make it as much like a race as possible. I think Dave Salo calls these “rehearsal swims”.
One thing I like to do if you have a wide variety of swimmers is handicap start them.
EI. Line up a heat and get everyone’s best time for the event. Start the slowest kid first and then
have every one dive in however many seconds faster than the first swimmers best time theirs is.
So, If you have 6 kids who’s best times are 1:00, !:02, 1:04, 1:06, 1:08 and 1:10
then you would start the kid who goes a 1:10, then count the seconds up from 0. The kid who’s best time is 1:08 would leave on 2 then the 1:06 kid would leave on 4 etc. with the fastest kid diving in last.
This is a fun way to let them RACE with the last 10 yards being very exciting.One of the questions kids will have is OK now I can do 50’s with 15/20 rest holding my goal pace but can I do 4 of them with no rest and hold the time. So let them do the real thing from time to time so they can learn to connect the pieces.
Not that much different. He has always maintained that technique and mental training are the two most important aspects of swimmer’s success. The emphasis he puts on the psychological part of training is a little surprising however. I have to admit that after reading the paper I felt like I was not doing enough on the mental side. Although I am probably doing it automatically as I talk to and encourage the swimmers during the sets, it’s just hard to have a systematic approach to psychological training.
drpaul, I think your question of what to do between sets is good one and an important one.
To me these spaces are opportunities to teach as well as work on race skill like starts turns etc.
Rushall’s resistance to drills is mainly for elite swimmers. I think most of us have kids who can benefit from drills as a way to at least call attention to aspects of the stroke that you want them to work on at race pace.
Also slower swimming works as both a recovery and, again, as a way to try a skill under less stressful conditions before trying to perform it under the stress of their main set.
I agree with Rushall that doing stroke work at slow speeds and doing drills in the traditional way are not going to lead to stroke improvement at the desired speed. But they can set the tone.
I think it is a great time to do a lot of Boomer/Nelms kind of stuff as well. Let them work on qualities like
tone, torque management, breathing etc. that they will need to use instinctually when racing.And, of course, there’s always my kids favorite…. the social kick! I always feel like I am giving up valuable time when I do that but sometimes it’s exactly what the kids need and is an opportunity to joke around with them a bit yourself.
Here’s my challenge: I have always emphasized the IM’s, as any club coach should do in my opinion, but that is a debate for another time.
I have found that doing 25’s at 100 Pace is great for the 200 IM and doing 50’s and 200 pace is great for the 400 IM. A little bit of transition work mixed in with the occasional IM rehearsal swim and walla! I think you have some successful IMers.
But, if the goal is to get 3 sets of each event in per week, how do you have the time. If have 4 2 hour practices per week and 2 1″45 practices.
There is not enough time to get in all the combinations of 25’s and 50’s of each stroke not to mention training for the 500 and above.
Recently I have hear the idea of doing 3-5 times the race distance. Is 12 x 25 or 12 x 50 really enough?
That is my only real concern going forward, but I really want to make sure I plan properly so there are no glaring holes in our training.We do drylands but it is as much to make up for limited pool time and appease the parents than anything.
The biggest difference between what I do and what is recommended is how we handle failure in the sets.
I don’t have the room ( or probably the patience ) to have kids go to another lane and recover while everyone else finishes.
So what I do is keep them moving in as “relevant” way possible while still not practicing broken down swimming.
For example, tonight we were doing a set of 75’s at 500 pace. I have kids sit out a repeat after they miss 2 in a row not one ( Dr. Rushal actually though that was fine ) After they miss their second round of 2 they were to go to 50’s at 500 pace. This is, obviously, much easier. If they miss one of those then 25’s. If they miss one there, then they keep doing 25s but they just work on their breakout then swim easy.
That flow chart is used for all the distances.
I guess the big question would be, is this compromising the self regulating nature of USRPT which is so important. I don’t think it is, but I will have to keep an eye on the swimmers just to make sure.
