ajthomas wrote:
I am just a few years older than you (well maybe, I turned 40 yesterday) so they hadn't "caught on" when I was in college. I am rather alarmed that they ever caught on.
In any event: as a former world class swimmer what were your experiences measuring training load and fitness? Did coach on the elite level try and do this?
I think the blow outs were never for more than about 15m or so, but dumb nonetheless. My first experience with blow-outs was around 2004ish, and I retired in 2008 when I was 25.
I never swam somewhere that kept sophisticated track of load/fitness. In high school we did a lot of test sets (6x100 on 6:00, 6x200 on 8:00, T30, 18x100, on 1:40, 8x50 on 3:00) that were recorded and posted, so you could track progress over a season. College testing was more simple, but not recorded - Wednesdays were "dive day" with sets varying over the course of the year from 6x100's on 6 to 4x50 on complete recovery, varying by time of the season. Friday's were "V02 max" days - 5x{3x50 on :35 best average, 150 easy} or some slight variation. Post grad/Pro - David Marsh just kind of looked you in they eye and gave you a workout for the day. There was general structure to the season, but no predictability to the testing/loading/unloading of workouts.
As far as testing physiological parameters, at swim meets, USA Swimming Nat'l Team staff would take ear-blood for lactate post race, and you had to warm down til you were below some threshold (I don't remember the numbers) but at various points in the season, clearing took 10-40 minutes, depending on the race etc. I also got tested during dive sets at the OTC in Colorado Springs, to gage response/clearance ability, but to my knowledge the numbers were never recorded.
I've been out of the sport for 8 years now, so I'm sure that things have changed, and as the sport becomes more professional, more care is taken to record and track. For me it was practice times, volume and feel that were the indicators of training. Feel being the most overrated but easiest to fall back on.
Feel is crap. Don't trust it. Best times feeling like dog crap, dog crap times feeling like $1,000,000.
I wrote this, you should read it:
https://www.slowtwitch.com/...n_Swimming_6700.html