Week #38, 2012 – T2 Aquatics

I feel that to get a good sense of what’s going on in a workout, we’ve got to understand how the workout fits into the week, month, season, and year. Here is an example of how we start the week at T2 Aquatics on Monday, and then Tuesday.

The AM workout on Monday is not included (it tends to be pretty general, mixing of strokes — and is either 3500 yards or 5500-6500 yards depending on schoool requirements as well as the individual).

Our Monday session is mainly aerobic threshold work, and this Monday we plan to do some IM work (FreeIM which is Free, Back, Breast, Free) to be specific. We are setting up a Freestyle Active Rest set on Tuesday. Oftentimes we will train Freestyle threshold on Mondays and go to “Stroke” or “IM” Active Rest on Tuesdays. I view a week’s worth of workouts as one continuous body of work, so it’s important to me set up more than one day at a time.

Our Tuesday session is an “Active Rest” session. This particular week we are training Freestyle “2nd 100 pace” for a 200. I like the 2nd 100 pace sets because I feel like the athletes can accomplish the repeats (and do more than just one or two of them) with a great stroke. Going for a “descend to all-out” of trying to get within 3-4 seconds of a lifetime best 100 time will raise the athlete’s lactate too high and demand too much from them in terms of energy output. I want them to be a) pretty fast, while b) swimming with high levels of efficiency and c) low stroke tempo compared to race stroke tempo (.15 to .25 slower per stroke cycle is perfect). I feel like the goals I’ve indicated at the top of the workout (see Goal Paces with Split times) will set the athletes up to accomplish these things.

Of note: we tend to do a major kicking set on Monday afternoon, which is followed by a pull set — which then is followed by the threshold set. This particular Monday’s kick set will be 1000 yards, which is on the low end of yardage for us for a kicking set. We tend to do sets like 15×100 on desceding intervals or like two weeks ago, a 2000 Kick for time. On an “Active Rest” day like Tuesday we tend to warmup with some shorter repeats (50s or 25s or 75s) with a stroke technique emphasis (even stroke count per 25 for SCY is one way to do it). Generally speaking we kick fast every day, but this week we a laying off the kick a little bit on Tuesday. One reason for this is: in Florda we have High School meets on Tuesdays, so 90% of our athletes will go straight from our practice to the other side of our pool (22 SCY lanes!) and compete in a High School Meet. While I do like to get a practice in, a generally save the kicking for non-meet days.

{Last year I did not allow my athletes to train on meet days, but because they tended toward slower swimming with little or no warmup/warmdown — I decided to get some good swimming done prior to the meet and make sure we don’t miss training. They’ve responded well and are swimming much faster at our weekly dual meets this year than last year — after a strong workout.

These workouts are for our 18 and under athletes. Postgrad workouts are somewhat different, although a few of the sets are the
 same. The yardage is different for the most part (overall and per set — excluding kicking sets), and the style of set is either
 reduced or different). My postgrads also do a much higher volume of resistance work, which tends to happen during AM
 practices 3x per week.}

Tune into my blog createperformance.blogspot.com to see what we’ll do on Wednesday to follow up the Monday-Tuesday workouts (go to pages two and three to access the workouts and to download the PDF file).

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Founder
11 years ago

Coach Yetter posted the Wednesday workout on his blog at http://createperformance.blogspot.ch/2012/09/wednesdays-workout.html.