That's a lot of time in the pool but as an age grouper (from when I was 10 until I was 14) I was putting in upwards of 25 hours a week in the pool...so for an Olympian to go 35 hours isn't surprising.

---

_______________________________

Good athletes train when they want to, great athletes train when they don't......

He's sitting out the Commonwealth Games to recover properly for the next Olympics

he has had surgery on his shoulder.

where did you see this? everything i've seen about his training suggests more like 20 hours a week in the pool max. in fact, i have a summary of his training volume over the years, and if it's accurate, it's actually pretty low.

brent,

i have always heard his volume was lower than american counterparts such as vendt. ive heard numbers of 60K to 80K regularly. that is not 35 hours, rather a lot more like 20. i have also heard the aussies dont do a ton of work in the 120-140 HR zones or much from 160+, but they do tons right between 140-160.

When I lived on the Gold Coast, I swam a few times at Miami pool where Hackett swims.
During the big prep stuff, he was swimming around 80km a week or thereabout, sometimes 90km a week.
Roughly a 4km an hr avg. with kick sets and drills...that gives about 20hrs.

35hrs would give 140km a week. Never heard any swimmers doing that on a regular basis. Maybe some marathons swimmers..but not even sure.

I think the key was "as much as 35 hours"

I see this being a peak week as very believable. I think all of us ex-swimmers can point to a training camp or big week every year than came close to 30 hours.

When I swam, my biggest week ever was 36 hours in the water during a 6 day training camp. We averaged about 3500m/hour for the week for a total of just over 125k. This was done with a 3 hour morning and a 3 hour evening workout for 6 days. It is amazing now when I think back on it.

it might be true for some other athletes, but by all accounts, it's not what hackett does.

Back in the early 90's the NCAA implemented limits on training times, no more than 20 or 25 hours / week devoted to training. That caused a lot of the Olympic level swimmers grief, since most were putting in at least 30 hours (including the drop-dead sprinter types). I was doing 18-20 per week in the pool, plus another 6 hours in the weight room, and I know that I was nowhere near what the top level US guys were doing.

35 hours / week is not unrealistic for the top middle distance swimmers.

---

Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

Lost in all the technique discussion is the fact that serious swimmers, and not just Olympians, spend a hell of alot of time in the pool ;-). Technique is good but so are hours.

35 hours per week x 90% = 31.5 hours per week in the pool. At 6 days per week, that's an average of 5:15 per day or 2 2 1/2 hour workouts per day. A typical high school aged kid in the US will put in 20 hours a week in the pool during school and get pretty close to 30 per week during the summer. Since 20 hours a week during school and 30 hours a week in the summer are not "superstar" numbers but just what that kid down the block who's on the local age group team does, the fact that Hackett (who doesn't have to go to school or work) puts in a few hours more is not shocking.

Actually, I was kind of surpised by Hackett's numbers. I would have guessed he spent more time in the pool than that.

When you are already swimming 20 hours per week, more than anything it is quality over quantity. Yes you need the volume of 20+ hours, but it won't do him any good if he is broken down all of the time. The aussies seem to train smarter than the US does, and it seems to show in results for distance free year after year.

you guys are missing the point. admittedly, the information i have is from four years ago, but denis cottrell(hackett's coach) hasn't changed things much since then. workouts are almost never over 8k and grant only did a couple of weeks of 80k in the two years before sydney. from 1996-2000, his average week was more like 50-60k.

yes, you can swim a lot more, and some people do. but with grant, the emphasis is on the right mix of work and not the volume. it seems he is a bit fragile - often sick and injured, which might keep him from doing more.

this is what I saw first hand as well and that was during the big prep. for the sydney games.

I came out of the era of swimming that said if a lot is good more than a lot must be better.

In HS I would swim from 5:00A to 7:15AM and from 2:45-6:00PM every week day even on meets which is 5.5 hours a day. We also usually had a saturday WO which was 3-4 hours long. A weekly total was around 31 hours a week plus any meets we might have had. I think if school had not got in the way we would have done more, I am sure my coach petitoned to get us out of class. Yardage wise since I was a D guy we hammered- A LOt As an example I would do at least every other week 4 or 5 x 3000 on the 31 min during one of my evening WO's, typically we would do 17,000-20,000 yards a day 6 days a week during peek season, about 110K Yards/ Week which equals 98K Meters/wk. Of course at the end of the season during taper we would back off alot.

College was actually easier, mostly becasue of NCAA rules limiting WO to 20 hrs/week. The yardage also went down but the intensity went way up, no garbage yardage.

For someone who swims like hackett can 30+ hours a week is not that surprising to me.

---

----------------------------------------------------------
I'm just a 10 cent rider on a $2,500.00 Bike

not sure if you were replying with me, but i was agreeing with you. i said volume is needed, but 50k-60k is plenty. aussies focus on quality. 50k-60k plus some dryland/core work probably gets him 20hrs on a weekly basis.

[reply]When you are already swimming 20 hours per week, more than anything it is quality over quantity. Yes you need the volume of 20+ hours, but it won't do him any good if he is broken down all of the time. The aussies seem to train smarter than the US does, and it seems to show in results for distance free year after year.[/reply]

First, saying that the Aussies train smarter in distance freestyle than the Americans based off of the results of the supremely talented Grant Hackett is like saying the Americans train smarter than the Aussies in backstroke based off of the dominating backstrokers that the Americans have had the past few Olympics (Krayzelburg, Peirsol).

Second, Grant Hackett beat Larsen Jensen this past Olympics by less than 2 seconds in the 1500m. A race that close is more about tactics and less about fitness.

sback

It is interesting that the issue here is time in the pool, not yardage covered. Once you do the math, it is clear that there is plenty of room for quality in his workout if he is "only" doing 8k in 2 1/2 hours. (Of course, if someone who could not swim fast tried to swim 8K in 2 1/2 hours it would be a different story).

My guess is that Hackett could easily cover an 8K workout distance in less than 1:30 of swimming time (an average pace of 1:07 per 100m - my guess is he actually does most of his sets at a much faster pace) making an 8K workout lasting 2 1/2 hours almost 40% rest time. Even if you throw in a warmup and warm down along with some kicking sets and he's still not going to be overly strained to get the swimming in in the given time.

aussies rule the pool distance wise in the mens events sback. there has gotta be something to that. glen houseman, kieran perkins, grant hacket, ian thorpe. usa has a MUCH larger base to draw on.

grant hackett was also very sick during last olympics.

in my last year of swimming we were coached by an aussie, and he was all about massive mileage.


i got the info off some site. cant remember which one. was prob an exagerration. popov also covered many kms in the pool.

I'll go with the American women for distance prowess.

Take 2004 world rankings (FINA's 2005 numbers have too many errors), and look at the top 100 swimmers in the Olympic distance events that year. I did a quick count and got:

Men's 400M free- 9 Australians, 21 Americans

Women's 400M free- 9 Australians, 29 Americans

Men's 1500M free- 10 Australians, 20 Americans

Women's 800M free- 11 Australians, 40 Americans

[reply]aussies rule the pool distance wise in the mens events sback. there has gotta be something to that. glen houseman, kieran perkins, grant hacket, ian thorpe. usa has a MUCH larger base to draw on.

grant hackett was also very sick during last olympics.

in my last year of swimming we were coached by an aussie, and he was all about massive mileage.


i got the info off some site. cant remember which one. was prob an exagerration. popov also covered many kms in the pool.[/reply]

There is no denying that the Aussies have dominated in the distance, thats not my point. You can't make a general statement about Aussie vs US preparation without any concrete data.

Your argument has a few holes in it. First it is true that the US has a larger population, however, people in the US don't care about swimming like they do in Austrailia. Baseball, basketball, hockey and football dominate over here. I'd be willing to bet that if we paid swimmers $10 million/year there'd be a lot more World Records set my Americans.

Second, within the swimming population, people don't care as much about distance as they do about stroke/sprints. Why do you think USA swimming issued the million dollar challenge a few Olympics ago? Its the same way with other sports like track and field, people don't care about distance like they care about the shorter events.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that one country doesn't neccessarily train better than the other, there is more emphasis placed on different parts of swimming in each country.

sback

umm could this be as a result of america having 50 times the population of australia?



with the sprint vs distance thing, that seems a lil strange to me considering how well the usa has done in 400im and women's distance swimming in the last 15 or so years.

All this talk about yardage/meterage is moot, unless the human body has some sort of odometer.

How hard (% of HR, threshold, VO2 max, whatever you want to measure) and how long (hours, minutes, seconds) is, IMHO, a bit more important.

Gawking about elite athletes' training volumes is fun on the 'Net, but ultimately pointless. N=1

Who knows...they might be elite athletes in spite of their training program.

Of course you are right Fulla, but if you subtract our Obese population (75%), as well as those that don't even know what a 400IM is, we're right about even....;)

---

"The more you sweat today, the less you bleed tomorrow"

anyway i read somewhere hackett is thinking about doing open water swimming...now that would be interesting.