How Fast Are You Swimming in Practice?

by Olivier Poirier-Leroy

Being an elite-level swimmer means you should be ready to race at any time, even in practice.

Over the course of nearly a decade Russia’s Alexander Popov dominated the 50m and 100m freestyles.

During that span he raced a lot. And I mean a lot.

The guy averaged around 100 races a year. Perhaps more impressively, he could swim insanely fast during training.

Dave Salo, head coach of the USC Trojans and one of the best coaches on the planet reflected on a swim workout he watched Popov swim at the Olympic Training Center in 2000 while preparing for the Sydney Olympics.

In the middle of a grueling session—at altitude, no less—Popov’s coach Gennadi Touretski pulled him out of the water and put him on the blocks to blast a 50m freestyle.

The result?

Popov swam a time that was 0.10 under the world record.

In practice.

Unrested.

(The timing was done on stopwatches, so clearly not official, and even if the stopwatches were off by a few tenths of a second it’s still a stupid-fast time.)

Popov–Full beast mode in competition and especially in training.

This was not a rare occurrence during the sprint Tsar’s training.

Touretski frequently had Popov (as well as his training mate and 100m freestyle world record holder Michael Klim) get up on the blocks during practice, after practice, as practice was starting, and belt out full blast efforts.

The goal was to be as close to possible as race pace under all sorts of circumstances, which would help the athlete feel confidant in their ability to be able to swim well no matter what the situation.

As Salo says, this kind of ability demonstrates a mindset that differs from the majority of swimmers:

There is a difference between training to make it through practice and training to race. That specificity of training, as well as developing a racing mind-set, makes all the difference in the world.

For most swimmers, they are under the impression that they have to “save up” their great swimming for competition. That they can’t be mentally prepared to swim a really fast race when they are neck deep in training.

See Also: Practice is Everything: The Mindset Behind Superhero Workouts

Now, I am not saying you need to be swimming best times every day in practice, because, well, that’s just kinda crazy. (Although it does happen from time to time…)

But you should be able to bang off close-to-race pace efforts while in training.

After all, swimming fast in practice will help you:

Be better prepared to swim even faster in competition.

Swimming fast isn’t really a mystery—in order to race fast you need to train fast.

It seems obvious, but how many swimmers ever reach that kind of intensity in practice? Consistently training at 60-70% of full intensity and velocity won’t give you the kind of improvement you are looking for. Especially if you are trying to gain blinding-speed.

One more time: Train fast, race fast.

Tighten the technical elements in your swimming.

One of the key things that happens when you swim your fastest in practice is that the “little” things—your race-speed flip turns, breakouts, and breathing patterns get some much-needed attention and TLC.

After all, the way you do those little things while swimming through a low intensity aerobic set is vastly different from the way you perform them during your events.

The speed you approach the wall is different. The wave you turn your head and try to breathe over is much larger. And the tempo you dolphin kick off the walls with is going to be different as well.

Getting race pace efforts in at practice means you are better prepared for meet-time when those walls and flip-turns come hurtling at you faster than you’ve ever experienced before.

Toughens you up mentally.

Ever met the “Perfect Conditions” racer? They are the swimmer that needs everything to be absolutely perfect in order to feel prepared to swim fast…

The warm-up needs to be done to a tee. They need to execute their stretching routine. They must have had 8 exact hours of sleep the night before.

Any deviation from their perfect conditions and here come the excuses—

Oh, I wasn’t really feeling that race. My technique didn’t feel right. I didn’t have a good warm-up.

Now, I’m not saying that those things aren’t important. They are. But you should be able to swim like a demon even when conditions are far from ideal.

Racing fast in practice proves to you that you can swim fast in a tough environment. It will show you that even after a long week of training, at the end of a 5,000m practice, that you can still bang out some seriously fast swimming.

You won’t need everything to be perfect because you already know that things don’t have to be ideal for you to swim like a chlorinated gangster.

The Takeaway

We’ve said it more than a few times around these parts—train the way you want to race, and race the way you train.

Randomly add some full blast efforts over the course of your training so that you don’t need to get ready to be ready.

How Swimmers Can Learn to Be More Consistent in Training

by Olivier Poirier-Leroy

You won’t always be the most talented or the fastest swimmer in the pool. But you can be the most consistent.

You can have the greatest facilities in the world. A world-class coach. A support system that is positive and encouraging. You can have a custom-designed nutrition plan tailored specifically to your needs, and have a strength coach on dial to help you in the gym.

But without consistency, it’s not worth a chlorinated lick.

All that awesome advice, all the support, all that knowledge and power—all for nothing without the consistency to go along with it.

After all…

• You say you want to improve your kick, but you aren’t adding any extra kick sets to your practices.
• You say you need to improve your underwater dolphin kick, but you keep doing your push-offs and breakouts the same way you always have.
• You say that you want to improve your core strength, but after each practice you go sit in the hot tub instead of doing core work.

Think of the importance of consistency this way: the way you perform at the big meet is going to be a reflection of the averages in your training.

And being consistent over long periods of time is not easy. It requires building good training habits, it means being patient, and it requires an implicit understanding that in order to be successful you need to get your reps in.

Most swimmers will say that they understand this. That they know they need to be consistent.

And yet, far too many will work super hard for a few days and then slip off the face of the planet for a week or two, continually repeating this go-go-and-stop-stop approach to their training, leaving them with a low average.

Here are a two things you can do to raise your average of consistency in the pool:

Log your workouts.

Quelle surprise, right?

But logging your workouts is not only the easiest way to get yourself some accountability and some much-needed self-awareness, it’s also a cheap and scientifically proven way to get better results from yourself.

Whatever form you use, a spreadsheet, a Word doc, one of the million tracking apps, a notebook, or even loose-leaf paper, track your workouts. It will provide you with an accurate overview of your training, nutrition and even sleep.

A bird’s eye-view of your training can help combat inconsistent training by showing you what happens right before you fall off (too much stress, lack of sleep, etc) so that you can avoid those pitfalls moving forward.

Having your workout history at hand can also show you that your expectations of having a much-improved kick are a little overblown given that you’ve done three kick sets in the past month, or that your core strength is stagnant because you haven’t done any ab work in weeks.

Grade your workouts.

One of the biggest mistakes swimmers make when they track and log their workouts is not measuring the things that matter most in their training. Overall volume and even attendance isn’t an accurate indicator of effort and focus.

This is one of the reasons that two swimmers, who attend all the same practices and swim the same meters, can have wildly different results when it comes to racing at the big meet.

Showing up to practice, while half the battle, is not enough.

How are you training while in the water? A simple way to stay on top of giving a consistent effort is to grade yourself after each workout. Out of 10, or with a letter grade, or with an emoji of your choice.

Since I was a 12-year old age grouper I have always given myself a quick ranking out of 10 for how I did at practice. The power of this simple action is profound the more I think about it in that it really forced me to be honest about how I was swimming.

Knowing that I had to grade myself later on pushed me while in practice. I wanted to be able to go home and write a 9.9 out of 10 because it felt good. Which meant that on a day when I felt like a “5” I would still push myself so that I could avoid having to give myself a bad grade.

The Takeaway

If you looked back at the “average” of your recent training, would you say that it matches up to the expectations that you have for your swimming?

If not, no worries—start logging and grading your workouts starting today and start getting more from your time swimming around the black line.

You won’t always be the most talented swimmer in the pool, or be the tallest, or be the swimmer with the best facilities or coaching, but you absolutely can be the most consistent athlete in the water.

Breathing and Swimmers’ Posture

Dr. John mullen, DPT, CSCS

http://www.swimmingscience.net

Breathing is obviously important to swimming.  We’ve discussed breathing multiple times on this site with topics from breathing patterns, Armpit breathing, Swimmer’s Lung Capacity, and Inspiratory Muscle Fatigue.  Most recently, Dr. Mitch Lomax discussed his recent findings in this area noting that “[Inspiratory Muscle Fatigue]occurs during swimming, even in very well trained swimmers. It can negatively affect stroke characteristics, and has the potential to speed up the occurrence limb muscle fatigue. The good news is that we can do something about it.”

One concept that we’ve also addressed has been breathing’s effect on spinal mechanics.  Breathing is often overlooked as a movement pattern, but plays a vital role in shaping movement.  Virtually everything we do involves breathing, whether we realize it or not.  As Hodges (2001) notes, “[r]espiratory activity of the diaphragm and other respiratory muscles is normally coordinated with their other functions, such as for postural control of the trunk when the limbs move.”

Postural abnormalities such as kyphosis (hunchback) and lordosis (swayback) are commonly associated with shoulder and back problems in swimming.  It has been well established that hyperactive upper trapezius activity, shortness of the pectoralis minor, and weakness in the lower trapezius are linked to shoulder maladies and to thoracic kyphosis.  Given what we know about respiratory mechanics, might breathing be an avenue to effect change in this area?    

One study to explore the link between breathing, posture and movement involved swimmers.  Obayashi (2012) studied twenty six healthy swimmers evenly divided into an exercise group and a control group.  Authors sought to determine the effect that breathing exercises could have on spinal curvature of the thoracic and lumbar spines.  The exercise group performed respiratory muscle exercises ten minutes per day three times per week over four weeks.  The control group only performed their normal swim training.  Findings included:

• Significant a decrease in the thoracic kyphosis by 13.1% in the exercise group  (less hunchback)
• Lumbar lordosis reduced by 17.7%  in the exercise group (less swayback)
• Compared to the non-exercise group, the exercise group had 8.6% less thoracic curve and 20.9% less lumbar curvature than the control group
• forced vital capacity and forced expiratory volume in 1.0 s were significantly increased after four weeks in the exercise group

Authors offered the following explanation for their findings:

“[A]rise in intra-abdominal pressure presses the rib cage upward and effectively allows the extension of the thoracic vertebrae.  In addition, we attribute the decrease of thoracic curvatures to a stretching effect on the thorax. In a previous study, Izumizaki et al reported that thoracic capacity and rib-cage movement were changed by thixotropy, which is the exercise of maximal expiration from maximum inspiration. The stiffness of the rib cage leads to thoracic kyphosis.  In this study, repetitive deep breathing resolved the stiffness of the rib cage and straightened thoracic kyphosis. This process may be responsible for altering the spinal curvature.“

Similarly, we wrote last year, “The rib cage is more than a passive protector of internal organs and a mere puppet of respiration. Though it’s not a body part amenable to cueing in the water, better rib cage function can free the swimmer of restrictions. Most importantly, optimal rib cage function via breathing, posture, and movement can improve shoulder health.” (See, Forgotten Rib Cage)  In sum, consider not just the shoulder itself, but the structure and function of all areas around it.  Breathing is a key part of that consideration.     

CONCLUSION

The findings in this study make intuitive sense to anyone who observes breathing in a training environment.  Yet training the breath is often seen as a wasted activity more properly reserved for quiet meditation and not of sufficient importance for “serious” dryland training. 
Even if you don’t set aside time for breathing exercises, attention to respiratory mechanics should be a part of any dryland program to optimize spinal function and develop healthy shoulders.  Though more study is needed in this area, this research does lend support to the connection between respiration and shoulder mechanics in competitive swimmers.    

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REFERENCES

1. Hodges PW, Heijnen I, Gandevia SC.J Physiol. 2001 Dec 15;537(Pt 3):999-1008.
2. Postural activity of the diaphragm is reduced in humans when respiratory demand increases.
3. Ludewig PM, Reynolds JF.  The association of scapular kinematics and glenohumeral joint pathologies.  J Orthop Sports Phys Ther. 2009 Feb;39(2):90-104. doi: 10.2519/jospt.2009.2808.
4. Obayashi H, Urabe Y, Yamanaka Y, Okuma R.  J Sport Rehabil. 2012 Feb;21(1):63-8. Epub 2011 Nov 15.  Effects of respiratory-muscle exercise on spinal curvature.
5. Izumizaki M, Ohshima Y, Iwase M, Homma I. Chest wall motion after thixotropy conditioning of inspiratory muscles in healthy humans. J Physiol Sci. 2006;56:433–440.

By Allan Phillips. Allan and his wife Katherine are heavily involved in the strength and conditioning community, for more information refer to Pike Athletics.

Dr. John mullen, DPT, CSCS

Dr. John Mullen, DPT, CSCS world-renowned physical therapist and strength coach.