STP wrote:
The orginal quote that started this thread needs to be read in the context of the fact that 40K per week is right about at the low end of normal for real swimmers. Pretty much every kid over the age of 14 who swims year round is doing at least that much yardage and the serious folks are doing nearly twice that.
I think that these numbers that you are throwing out need to be qualified. #1) Qualified by real data - where do your yardage stats come from? #2) also what level of performance is resulting from the yardage levels that you are giving?
From my own experiences, and my relationships with elite level age group and senior level coaches, there are a ton of 15-18 year olds going speeds of around 5:00 to 5:30 for 500 yards on 20-30k per week. A good portion of that is also spent doing non-freestyle. Some of the other strokes may be credited with a cross-training effect, but the same performance goals can be met with less total yardage if freestyle is the sole focus.
Quote:
Almost all tri related swim questions can be answered by analogizing to what you would say to a runner wondering how he can improve his 10K time after you find out that he is only running 5 miles per week.
I think this is a strawman argument. Just because you can't become elite with less than 1 hour per week of practice doesn't mean that the only path to greatness is 15 hours per week. Similarly, dismissing drills as "nonsense" is to make a caricature of the kind of intelligent, progressive, and successful approaches to developing form that age-group coaches all over the country employ.
There is a ton of area between 1 and 15 workouts per week, and that area between is, as johnnyo noted, steps in the progression. Thus, it's NOT really 6 months. It's a hell of a lot more.
Regards,
r.b.
Bringing you
Tweets @ http://twitter.com/findfreestyle and
Not just a bunch of drills - A Process.