Do programs like Daniel's apply to swimming?

it's probably similar. remember that jack daniels himself was a swimmer and took his knowledge from swimming and brought it to running.

In my experience nobody ever talked about any of the various parameters that you see here daily (LT, AT, VO2Max). I remember doing intervals and hard workouts, but nobody ever told us why we were doing them or what they were for.

I do remember there being a specific "taper" towards the big meets but that's about it.

Thinking back on it I wouldn't be surprised if we were over trained.

Yes, they do, they just call them different things. There is a lot more emphasis on technique (i.e.drills) in swimming, but there are swims where you'll do 12 x50 at 200 pace (i.e. 12x400 at mile pace).

generic template is:

300-500 warmup

500-1000 drills / technique

1000-2000 intervals, often on fixed times or increasing effort

or

1000-2000 long swims based on time (i.e. 15 minute steady swim)

300-500 drills / warmdown

That's a generic master's swim workout. Good swimmers (i.e. college, OT, will do 3-4 times that). One of the guys in Charlotte in their elite program swims 100K per week (he has the AR in the 50 free at the moment). 30 years ago when I swam competitively college teams were doing 70-80K per week. I've heard from recent grads that the trend now is less distance and more focus on technique.

Keith Stone has the basic template right, but if you're only doing 4000, and have you have decent technique, I'd go for a greater portion of hard stuff.Lots of 6x500 on 30 seconds rest, 20x100 on a sendoff with ~5 seconds rest, 10x200, and on occasion hard stuff like 10x100 on 1:30 for absolute best effort.

Now are there any books that you can point me towards or articles

I've tried doing some generic google searching and got nothing really about the physiology of different programs. Also, in regards to rest, you mentioned 5 second rest between some of the intervals. I have never seen anything like that in running and even 30 seconds rest is pretty short, at least in the workouts I've done. Is there a reason for the short rest?

ahhh yeahhh wrote:

Now are there any books that you can point me towards or articles

Go to swimoutlet.com. Plenty of training program books there. usms.org has other resources available.

ahhh yeahhh wrote:

I've tried doing some generic google searching and got nothing really about the physiology of different programs. Also, in regards to rest, you mentioned 5 second rest between some of the intervals. I have never seen anything like that in running and even 30 seconds rest is pretty short, at least in the workouts I've done. Is there a reason for the short rest?

The old 40/20 200 workout is a good example of short rest running workout that's been around for years. Teaches pacing, lactate tolerance. If you haven't seen anything like it running you should have.

Runners tend to lolly-gag around too long between repeats which decreases the value of the workout. If you're working your LT you should be taking very short rests and run at 5K/10K pace, if you are working true speed then take rests at least as long at the repeat ( or 2-3 times) but hammer the repeat. Standing around for 2-3 minutes after a 400 and running it a 5K pace isn't buying you that much.

Swimming and running recoveries are completely different.

For any swim workout to convert it to a running one, simpler multiply the rest by 3-5x and the distance by 4x and you get a good comparison.

Swimmers are able to take much shorter rests than runners.

As far as good books, read Maglischo's Swimming Fastest. It's the quivalent of the Coe/Martin book for swimmers.

A lot of overlap between swimming/running ideas. They still have the energy system, LT, VO2, lactate tolerance, power, etc. classification type system we do. The difference is they generally use intervals to improve everything so the workouts look different.

My college coach was big on Jon Urbanchek's colored cards system- do a T-30 steady swim at the beginning of the season to find aerobic threshold pace, and maybe once or twice more during the season. Then you got out the different colored pace cards and were supposed to use those to find out what your goal time should be for every rep of every set based on what kind of effort (aerobic, anaerobic, VO Max, all out sprint) you were supposed to be doing. As someone on the USMS board recently said, you come to fear the purple cards because those tended to be the 'till you're gonna puke' deals.

Swimming is almost entirely intervals because your muscles give out before your aerobic engine does. You don't want ot re-enforce bad technique, and even 5-10 seconds after a 200 yard/meter rep (taking 2-2:30) can seriously help reduce muscle fatigue to a point where you can kind of hold technique together without causing too much of a break for aerobic purposes.

My typical afternoon practice would be something like:

1000 yard warm-up- usually your choice of how you did it, but sometimes some light psrinting in the last 200 or so

2100 yard main set A- something like 7x300 aerobic hard with about 20 seconds of rest between each of you were making the interval right

1000 yards of kicking- ex- 10x100 on 1:50 to give you about 10 seconds or rest between each. Keep an aerobic pace, but still be able to carry on a conversation with the person in the next lane

2000 yard main set B- 16x125 swum 75 freestyle-50 other stroke with about 10 seconds est between each

10x50 sprint- 0n 45 seconds, hold in the 33-34 second range for each

A couple hundred warm down

The infamous fish burn set-

1000 warm-up

main set of

5x100 on 1:30

4x200 on 2:30

3x300 on 3:30

2x400 on 4:30

1x500 on 5:30

so you pretty much increased intensity and distance per rep as you went on. In my lane of mediocrity, if you made it midway through the 300s, you were a studette. Once you failed in the set, you got out, did 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups, and then swam continuously until someone finished the set or everyone failed. And the coach would kill you if you got in the way of someone who was still making the send-off interval.

Lots of fixed send-off intervals in swimming because of the limitations of pool space. The teams I swam on, we'd typically have 6-7 people in a 25 yard lane lane, and if you only had 4, it seemed blissfully uncrowded.

This was for a pretty average D3 team. We'd do another 3-4K for morning practice during the school year, some dryland before practice, and 15K per day long course meters on the post-Christmas trip.