I don't have any speed for sale... sorry!

I can sell you a drag suit though! ;-P

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MS: Exercise Science
Your speed matters a lot, sometimes you need to be very fast, where sometimes you need to breakdown your speed.

Traditional pool training is basically ALL speedwork. Net of some warmups and drill, it's all intervals. Swimmers can do this because there is no impact, and the events are relatively short in duration (unlike cycling).

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
Depression, Neurocognitive problems, Dementias (Testing and Evaluation), Trauma and PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

i guess i could have been more elaborate..


instead of doing 100m repeats, is it effective to do 50m or 25m sprints? kind of like doing 400m or 200m repeats in running instead of 800m.

U_E

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There is a lot of value in mixing it up. Some of the fish can share their favorite sets. Personally, I like ladders: 50-100-200-400-400-200-100-50; the variety is less boring than 10x100.

Speed work (short intervals) is key for tris, since you may need to sprint to catch a faster set of feet or to be in the right group during the first 100-200m when everyone surges out. The swim isn't just a 1500m solo race.

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
Depression, Neurocognitive problems, Dementias (Testing and Evaluation), Trauma and PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

lol, i totally just realized this is in the classifieds..... hahaa



can a mod please move this?



thanks

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first time i've ever had to move a thread from classifieds to the tri forum.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

The Brits don't call it silly season for nothing...

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The Triathlon Squad

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What, exactly, is the value in mixing it up? One thing I absolutely hate about traditional swim workouts is that they seem to always be so damn complicated. I am so focused on trying to remember what I am supposed to be doing that I find it very hard to focus on form or power application. I have so many technique flaws that I need to be fixing that "boring" is never a problem for me. I greatly prefer 20x100 to some ladder workout where I can never figure out what i just did, what i am doing next, what pace it should be at, what end of the pool I am going to end up at, what day it is, what my locker combo was...

Am I losing a valuable training effect by doing simple workouts where I can get into a rythm? Or is it just a personal preference thing for people whose swim stroke is a little more second nature than mine?

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The plural of anecdote is not data. :-)
- Andrew Coggan

oh yes there is, but i cant tell you or i wont have as huge lead out of the water i desperately need for my lousy bike splits.

20x100s is not speed work lol. pool swim training and tri swim training are completely different for me.

i agree with previous post speed work for a try is different from speed work for competition swimming. In tri you need to focus on getting faster without using energy. This is the kind of stuff swimmers do durring taper. getting used to holding race pace while dropping off the intensity (or at least thats what i did as part of my end of season prep). Pace 50s and 100s are a good place to start. If thats too easy set ideal race pace as your goal go for that if you currently swim 1:30 per hundred durring a tri and bike and run afterward try 1:15 or 1:20 as your interval on 5-10 seconds rest.

Some weird advice here. Intervals and speed work are not the same thing. At all.

Speed work for swimming can be as short as 15m flat out from a dive (at least that's the shortest that I can remember doing). So you're really only stroking once or twice. I can remember sets going 15m flat out (swim through to 50m easy), then 20m flat out (swim through to 50m easy), then 25m flat out (swim through to 50m easy). We would repeat that a few times and there would be lots of rest between each sprint. On different occasions we'd work from 15m to 45m doing this sort of thing (for some credibility, Eamon Sullivan was one of the guys doing these sessions).

If you want to include some speed work to sharpen up, I'd recommend doing some push start 15-20m max effort sprints at the end of your session (followed by some cool down). I used to regularly do 6x20m at the end of an otherwise "easy" session. Be a little careful on the first one as your don't want to hurt your shoulders.

Just to clarify, I'm not recommending that this is a necessary part of triathlon training, I'm just answering, "yes", there is speedwork for swimming.

Examples of my speed work

20X50 odds easy evens hard ~ 15 seconds rest
10X25 sprint with a lot of rest between...like 30-45 seconds...It's hard to do those now since I'm swimming long course.

10X150 Sprint 50, easy 50, sprint 50 --- those are really hard.

Getting into longer intervals:
6X500 as: 100 hard, 100 easy, 100 hard, 100 easy, 100 hard.
Those sets go fast and have done a lot for my 1650.

jaretj

8 x 25 max sprint on 2:30

Also called alactate work. Mostly about neuromuscular activation as the work is not usually long enough to induce a whole lot of pain, although by th 8th one you do start to get a little worked up.

Some folks would call lactate production sets speedwork, you can google for that and should get good hits.

Boredom is a huge factor for dedicated fish. When you're talking 4 hours in the pool every day, mixing it up really does help you stay engaged and mentally fresh. There are times when a main set of the day can be 6K in the distance lane. 60x100 freestyle only is pretty awful from a boredom standpoint. By the tim you get to #27, you're already begging the coach to make the next one butterfly or breaststroke or double trudgeon crawl or something.

In contrast, for all that you can bitch about the sendoff times, something like the fish burn set (5x100, 4x200, 3x300, 2x400, 1x500) is seen as fun because you never really feel like you get stuck in a rut.

As for second nature, yes, you do get to a point when you can pretty much be working on two areas of your stroke where coach thinks you need help, making a pretty variable sendoff interval, tracking each rep within a set based on whether it's supposed to be hard easy descending ro whatnot, consistently counting the number of lengths of 300s and 400s acturately and the right number of reps withing the set and still have enough brain power left over to also spend the middle 1000 yards of the set working on a rough mental outline for the political science paper due on Tuesday.

I can remember a news article a ways back where the reporter asked one of the girls on the US national team what she thought about during practice, and her reply was that since French class had been hard lately, she worked on going over conjugating French verbs in her head during the boring parts of practice.

As for speed, a triathlete doesn't need to be a fast 50M swimmer. But they should be working on having a fair amount of tactical speed because being able to crank it up for 25M or 50M here and there can be very useful when you're trying to catch a better draft, better position yourself for a turn buoy, or get out of the middle of a clump of swimmers.

That's a speed workout, not an interval what people have been posting.
My most hated workout is 8 x 100's on 3:00min, holding ~:55's SCY. All speed, decent distance, plenty of rest to throw up.
A lot of people have been throwing out interval workouts, where rest is small and pace is rather attainable over a longer distance.

sprinting = speed work.

Sets like 5 x 100's with a couple minutes rest are really good. you can do them with or without active recovery if you want. But these 5 have to be all out balls to the wall sprints. None of this...oh I'm tired and better swim more efficient crap. Frankly if you aren't already efficient and able to hold that stroke for a hard 100...you shouldn't do real speed work.

Here is a more advanced speed workout. :-) Don't try this at home kids.
http://www.floswimming.org/...-auburn-puke-session

I love that set.

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That's a pretty good set. 3 minutes would be a bit light for me to hold :55's. I'd do something like this :55, :58, :59, 1:00, 1:00, etc.

And some people saying that triathletes don't need speed, etc are dead wrong. how do you get faster without speed work?

Intervals are great to build up endurance and to maintain a certain speed over time. but without speed work you don't build the power necessary to increase the speed you swim at over longer distances.

Perhaps we should never try to increase our power on the bike...because we don't need to go faster??!

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Fishburn! Holy smoke I just got chills up my spine. This is the first time I have ever heard another swimmer mention this dreadful word. Our sendoffs in college: 1:30, 2:30, 3:30, 4:30, 5:30. I may not swim at all this week, just from thinking about this set.

The nice thing about being an average swimmer with that set is that I wasn't expected to make it all the way through it with the traditional intervals on the 30s. As long as I made through the 200s, it was judged to be an acceptable effort.

+1 to the throwing up

If you've got a 4-6 person group in your lane, try a couple hundred yards of continuous relay with each person going one length. It can be a fun way to approach an otherwise ordinary set of short sprints.

From my masters class a few years back: 5x100 on a 5 minute interval (I think it was 5 minutes). Balls out pace. Sounds easy, until about 50 yards/meters into the 3rd interval, then you hang on for dear life.

Not exactly speed work, but 50 yards on a 60 second interval. The interval decreases by 1 second for each 50. See how long you can go before you can't make the interval. You need to write out your send-off times on a white board or something for this one...

The "speed work" was not something I did not often, but definitely made me stronger.

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f/k/a mclamb6

One of our coaches is an excellent sprint coach. The majority of age-groupers he sent to college were sprinters. He does a lot of what I would call non-traditional sprint sets. By "traditional," I refer to sets of 50s on a 2 minute interval or 100s on a 3 minute interval. I'll try to list some of our sets, but my memory is never very good at these things...

2 x (4 x 25). First is half fast/half easy, second is half easy/half fast, third is all easy, last is all fast.

150s. Alternate easy and fast through the 150. I think it's 12 1/2 easy, 12 1/2 fast, 25 easy, 25 fast, 25 easy, 25 fast, 12 1/2 easy, 12 1/2 fast.

Super 500. This is essentially a 5 x broken 100. Easy 100 is a 25/50/25. The rest is something like 40, 1:30, and 50, but I can't really remember. Everything is fast and the set is intended to make you go fast with less than full recovery. I also recall doing something like this with maybe more rest after each 100.

Another of our coaches really likes descending. She will give us sets of maybe 3-5 50s or 100s. When she told me descending was a drill, I never approached these sets the same way again.

Also, zoomers are really good to improve technique for going fast. They get you up to race speed so you can develop your technique at sprint speeds. When Mike Collins coached us at the Davis Aquatic Masters, sprint workouts regularly involved zoomers.

You don't log a lot of yards doing speed workouts, but that isn't the point. These workouts are about quality, not quantity.

Ken