Turnover and effort.

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Proud Founder of the Jamis Mafia- Daring to be different.

Basically, yes. Do the exact same thing, (or try to) but applying less force.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

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

Good swimmers have as many different gears as a road bike- tell them to swim at pace X and they'll know they have to swim at exertion level Y to do so. And when they've got the right feel for the water and the clock in their head is on, they'll be within a second or two of pace X for every single repeat.

My swimming rear cassette is missing some cogs. I think I swim in my 39-23 most of the time, but occasionally I'll kick'er down into 39-17 for some really fast repeats at a blazing 1:35-1:40/100 pace. I guess that is about right according to all the swim snobs that say it takes 10 years to learn to swim like a swimmer should. Maybe you add a gear to your cassette every year, thus a 10 speed:-)

I don't mean anything about the snob thing, I just suck at swimming and want to get better at it in a little less than 10 freaking years!!!!!!!!!!!

I guess I would say that...

good technique does not make you swim fast or slow, it just give you the set up to swim as fast as you choose to swim

technique + endurance + strength = FAST

monkey with any of the three components and you can effect effort and/or ability

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http://www.clevetriclub.com

rob reddy

If throwing a baseball is mostly technique, then how does a (really good) thrower throw slower/easier?...

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"Go yell at an M&M"

Swim faster=pull harder

Technique should be the same.

Stroke count may go up a little, but shouldn't go up too much.

Or so I've been told by a :52 IM swimmer

Fla Jill said it best: """Good swimmers have as many different gears as a road bike- tell them to swim at pace X and they'll know they have to swim at exertion level Y to do so. And when they've got the right feel for the water and the clock in their head is on, they'll be within a second or two of pace X for every single repeat."""

It's just like cycling or running in that you can ride easier or you can ride harder. The difference is the effort required.

Great post Fla Jill

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

Well, you can't throw some pitches slowly. So if we use that analogy, then I would say that a great swimmer can't swim slow with the same great technique.

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Too f@ckin depressed from various injuries to care about having a signature line.

Sponsored by Blue Shield PPO.

I didn't say "pitching".

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"Go yell at an M&M"

Generally speaking, good runners adjust their speed by altering stride length, turnover stays pretty much the same.

Good swimmers adjust by altering turnover, distance per stroke remains pretty much the same.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

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

I cannot wait for the day that I can swim 'easy'. I have two gears - difficult, and more difficult.

Short axis strokes aren't that hard to mix the pace up on. Swim 50 flys and 200 flys in the same meet, and you figure out the difference between all out sprinting and anaerobic hell (aka 200) pace pretty quickly.

But then I'm a freak who finds slow butterfly to be rather relaxing.

I could never swim fly slowly, I found it just felt really weird. I mostly did one-armed fly if I had to do it slowly.

Of course, in this set, I ended up doing some pretty slow fly by the end, as my arms were falling off.

10x200y fly on 2:45. (might have been on 2:35). There were 2 of us on the team who were fairly close in the 200, I was a little faster at the 200, Rolf was a little faster in the 100. We were trying to kill each other. Best workout I ever had, I was shattered for 3 days afterwards.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

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

Obviously the 50 fly and 200 fly are much different races; you might only breath on the turn in the 50. 200 fly is a great race when you are shaved and hit the taper though; I dropped 6 seconds both times I swam in shaved. But, I am also fairly confident that my last 200 fly was in 1986.

What I was saying is that it's hard to swim fly slowly. Just about anyone any reasonable high school or college swimmer could swim 10,000 yards straight freestyle or backstroke Hardly any could swim more than a few hundred yards of fly straight without starting to cheat a lot like crazy, like one armed strokes or whatever.

David Wharton: 16,000m IM. Straight. Long course.

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"Go yell at an M&M"

May I add a little something to technique+endurance+strength =fast.

I teach the kids on our swim team thus: technique + conditioning(endurance,strength)+ attitude = fast

You don't want it, you won't get it.

I trained in the same pool as Dave Wharton for a couple weeks in late December 1985 and January 1986. It does not really surprise me that he could swim a 16,000 IM. But this confirms that it takes a remarkable swimmer that is well coached to swim more than a few hundred yards of fly without cheating. I swam for his coach, Dick Shoulberg, when I was 10 and 11 and a few times after that during summers and Christmas breaks. Dick was very good a limiting how much you could cheat swimming fly in practice, which made you much better in races (but not so good at keeping you from cheating swimming backstroke). For example, in 1983, Dick had us swimming at this pool during the summer where you could swim about 100 meters straight if you swam across is diagonally, and he would have us finish 3 hour practices by doing 100 meter flys without stopping and without turns obviously. There were about 100 swimmers in the pool doing this so it makes the average open water swim seem like child's play by comparison.

"What I was saying is that it's hard to swim fly slowly. Just about anyone any reasonable high school or college swimmer could swim 10,000 yards straight freestyle or backstroke Hardly any could swim more than a few hundred yards of fly straight without starting to cheat a lot like crazy, like one armed strokes or whatever. "

Not neccessarily. We regularly did 3,000-4,000 meter fly sets (usually either 3x1,000 or 10x400) - NO cheating allowed! It was always a miserable experience, but certainly doable for the average USS swimmer (I swam a 2:11 200 fly - certainly not stellar!). I do agree with you on the 10,000 yard free thing - boring asall hell but not that difficult for a swimmer.

I think that most decent swimmers could do that type of set if they were forced to, but beyond "character building" it probably did more harm than good considering that you could not maintain any semblance of decent form for those workouts (David Wharton and Mary T excepted)

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

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

And I was never a fast fly swimmer, maybe 1:15 for 100 yards, but I won a bet with my high school coach by doing a mile of perfectly nice and legal butterfly. Not too bad once you get the rhythm down.

I would agree with that - at least as far as the 1,000's go. The 400's were a little more reasonable as I felt like I was able to hold a somewhat decent form for most of it.

But yeah, I think it was more about character building than anything else. And I think it worked - a 200 fly in a race is NOTHING compared to those damn 1000's!!! ;)

I do know that when I switched teams (in the swimming sense people, not the sexual preference sense ;)) when I was 17, the new team I was on (which was a VERY well respected USS program - the coach definitly knew his stuff), my fly times went up quite a bit. On the new team where we barely did any fly and instead focused on lots of distance free, I just couldn't get near my PR. There's gotta be SOMETHING to the big fly yardage we used to do - even if it was just a placebo effect!

club i swam at, 14 yr old kid would do the 30 min tests doing fly. did something like 2300m.