lightheir wrote:
I'll take the devils advocate position here.
I've been to a variety of masters groups. Honestly, I think they are over-rated for triathletes. (Note I said triathletes, NOT pure swimmers!)
None of the masters groups I have been to have done real meaningful stroke correction. Literally none. The best you get is like a quick one-liner, but that's it. I mean, it's masters, not private swim lessons, so they don't have the time or place to correct your stroke in the middle of a group workout.
They also often do too many strokes. I swim infrequently enough that the last thing I need to be doing is a lot of backstroke, breastroke or fly. Sorry, I'm not buying any argument that it's better for a triathlete who swims <5hrs a week and often 3ish hr/wk to be mixing it up with other strokes unless they already can do them fairly well.
It's also exceedingly rare for the masters workout to match up with your race-specific planned swim workouts. It's often too hard or too easy.
The best training thing about masters is that for most of us AGers, you will have the chance to swim with people slightly (or much) faster than you, so you can push yourself harder every time you go. Again, is that even good? I'd argue not. I don't go out every SBR workout trying to kill myself every time. And even on my hardest training days, it's just a bad idea to all-out it like race day. Might have made my swim briefly better, but in the grand scheme of a training plan with near-max SBR, not a good idea.
Some masters groups have TONS of down time waiting around in the lane for sets to finish, or next set. Most of the masters i've been to I've only been swimming about 60%, max 75% of the time, the rest is waiting, and that's not even counting the rest time between sets. Just lots of talking and waiting for other groups to start at the same time. It's pretty normal for me to swim another 1000 or even 2000+ after a 60min masters because we probably swam only 1000-1400 yards total of freestyle during the entire session - the rest was waiting, kick sets, toy sets, and other strokes.
Then there's the scheduling headache, it is what it is. And it sucks in most cases.
I don't need a masters group just to make me show up at the pool to train or to motivate me to go hard when it counts. If you need that, then ok, it's better for you because the alternative is not showing up or not training hard. If I want stroke correction, I'll hire a coach to do it in detail with video analysis, which is like 100x higher yield than masters stroke-correction advice. And I can follow a workout, and do Z4-5 and all-outs when prescribed.
The one thing I definitely do miss about masters though, which is a real benefit - being around other fellow swimmers or triathletes who are excited about the sport and happy to be there and sharing the experience. That's a great thing, and I absolutely wish I could have it for my own swim workouts every time. Alas, all the problems I've listed above simply outweigh it for me in this stage of my already-too-busy life. So it's back to doing my own thing the vast majority of the time and dropping in on masters periodically for the fun of it.
I also know folks who really benefit from masters, and love it - they are typically going nearly every day and are all pure swimmers (not triathletes) who were ex-collegiate swimmers and can't fathom swimming less than 5x/wk.
I concur with all of this.
Almost every masters club is overrated for
the amount of work the standard triathlete is willing to put in.
Keep in mind that I am a triathlete that swims 20-30km per week these days, so I am swimming around 2000-2500m of fly, 4000m of backstroke, 4000m breast stroke, 3000m of kicking and rest is free every week. This leaves me swimming 7000m to 15000m of freestyle (roughly).
If I was just training exclusively for tri, I would be swimming 7000m per week and that would be plenty. All those other strokes would be a waste of time because my goal would be to do the free leg of a tri as fast as possible. Telling me to swim backstroke would be like telling me to go do cyclocross in my limited time when I need my time to ride my TT bike. Backstroke would be a nice diversion but it is not useful if I am racing a 1900m free with a wetsuit and quite happy to give away 1 min in the swim just to get to T1.
Here is the problem with Masters swimming. I race masters swimming in various events. As a masters swimmer, I am trying to take a 1/10th a second off my 50 fly or a quarter second off my 200 breast stroke. I can do zero training and be 2 seconds on my 50 fly, or 5 seconds slower on my 200 breast. Masters swimmers are fighting for those last few fractions of seconds. This is what we train for.
Triathletes at an age group level don't care about fractions of a second or seconds. 60 seconds on 1900m is 3 seconds per 100m. I can get within my ultimate 1900m split off 4000m of free per week because I already have cardio fitness from swim and bike. I need to go from 4000m per week to 25000m per week to get me that final 1 minute. Or I can swim slower and spend 5 min per day on race week working on my transition and have the fastest transitions in my age group (I won Kona and 70.3 combined transitions in my age group in 2010....world champion at combined transitions....way easier than swimming faster)
So if I show up at masters for for my 4000m per week and they make me doing half my time on other strokes, I am wasting my time.
I am sold on masters swimming for various reasons, but its to become a faster swimmer, not to get the fastest triathlon time I can get on limited tri training.
If you have a good triathlon focused squad and its a good social scene than great. Most triathletes would just benefit from doing hard 100's, with a pull buoy at high turnover (forget about glide, its overated in a wetsuit in chop), getting as much oxygen per minute (high turnoover does that), and get to T1 "fast enough".
But you go to most masters swims and they tell you to glide, they make you do all the other strokes, and they do pretty well everything that you don't need to do to be a faster open water wetsuit swimmer with 1000 friends in waves off your 2 hrs of swim time per week.
For sure if you want to be a better pure swimmer, then go to masters 3x per week and go compliment that with 5 other swims per week, but that's not what most triathletes will do so its pointless recommending something that does not maximize time investment.