And don’t bother cooling down, either

October 15, 2009 at 8:50 pm | In News, OW Training | 1 Comment
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First we pointed out you have more to fear from Bambi than Bruce.*   Now, another misconception put to rest, courtesy of the New York Times.  To wit, a cool down is apparently worthless.  Or at any rate, there’s no evidence it does you any good.

…the cool-down is enshrined in training lore. It’s in physiology textbooks, personal trainers often insist on it, fitness magazines tell you that you must do it — and some exercise equipment at gyms automatically includes it. You punch in the time you want to work out on the machine and when your time is up, the machine automatically reduces the workload and continues for five minutes so you can cool down.

The problem, says Hirofumi Tanaka, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas, Austin, is that there is pretty much no science behind the cool-down advice.

(* The mechanical shark used in the film [Jaws] was nicknamed “Bruce” by its handlers, and the “full body” version tours around museums, while “Bruce II” resides at the Universal Theme Parks and “bites at” tourists on the tour ride.  From IMDB.com)

Tapering tips

June 2, 2008 at 12:16 pm | In Caroline | 1 Comment
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This article on Active.com discusses tapering for a distance swim:

Open-water tapers need not last two or three weeks (the length of a typical pool-swimmer?s taper). One week is usually plenty of time to feel rested and recovered if you are used to endurance training throughout the season. In fact, an open-water swimmer preparing for a five- to 10-mile race need only pare down the distance and intensity of his workouts maybe three days before the event.

In such extreme high-endurance events, I prefer to take the day prior to the race off completely (as long as I have enough time to warm up 30 minutes the morning of the event itself). This full day off forces your body to rest and recover (even if you think you may not need it, you might), and your consistently fatigued muscles will feel fresher with a full 24 hours of idle rest.

In preparing for this coming weekend’s Great Chesapeake Bay swim, I’ve spent nine months on an entirely haphazard, three-day-a-week-except-when-I-was-too-tired-to-get-out-of-bed solo training program. I’ve tried to work on endurance and some speed, but mostly endurance, on the grounds that getting across will be more important than getting across fast.

With one week to go I did a roughly full-distance swim, broken out as 6000 yards in one pool and, later in the day, 1600 meters in another. All at a fairly easy pace.

With five days to go, I did just under 3000 yards, mostly in 300 sets, again at a steady but not exhausting pace.

Two days before the swim, I plan to do a very easy one mile, probably at the Richmond Tri Club Friday night swim, so I can get in a little last-minute open water work, and test out my new goggles.

The day before, I’ll just paddle around in the pool to stay loose.

I don’t think there’s any warmup at the swim, so I plan to try to do a little early morning warming up in what I expect will be a tiny hotel pool.

And then we’ll see….

Swim like Ryan

March 20, 2008 at 5:32 pm | In Caroline | Leave a Comment
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Today the New York Times features a story on Olympic hopeful (and veteran) Ryan Lochte’s training–and what elements of that training we ordinary mortals might adapt to our own use. Among the points made:

Even though Lochte has been swimming since he was 9, he has not yet perfected his strokes. “I spend more time on stroke mechanics now than I ever have,” he said.

He also spends part of each practice slowing things way down.

“The only way to really work on technique is to swim very slowly and really think about every little thing that you’re doing,” he said. “How your body is positioned, what your hips are doing, the positioning of your shoulders and hands and feet.”

Also:

“I work a lot on staying high in the water, not fighting the water, moving with the water,” Lochte said.

To that end, he concentrates on keeping his belly above the water during his backstroke and he also frequently practices with a piece of buoyant foam (or pull buoy) between his legs. Using a buoy, Troy said, can be useful for swimmers, because “you start to feel proper body positioning, then you replicate that” without the buoy.

And:

Perhaps the single biggest change in Lochte’s swimming routine from days past is the amount of pure kicking he does, sometimes with fins (his are standard, long fins) or a kickboard, sometimes without.

“Kicking stabilizes the body,” Troy said. “You achieve correct body position far more with the legs than the arms.”

Leg muscles require far more oxygen than the arms do, he added, so the legs “must be fit” or a swimmer risks early exhaustion.

“The amount of kicking that most elite swimmers do in practice has gone up at least 20 percent in the past few years,” Troy said.

He said that coaches used to have athletes kicking less because “it takes more time in the practices to kick than to swim,” so you get “less overall swimming volume.” But most of them have come to realize that less volume with more kicking produces world records.

So there you go: world records.

Weight training is also mentioned, and finally:

Even if you’re a fitness swimmer, incorporate competition and goal-setting into your routine. You don’t necessarily have to sign up for races, but aim to reach the far wall a smidgen faster than you did the day before, or try to break a minute in the 100-meter freestyle, a good benchmark for speed. Lochte’s best time in that event is 49.04 seconds, a mark he set Saturday at the USA Swimming Sectionals competition in Orlando, Fla. He said he would like to bring it down to 48.2

I do not foresee a sub-minute 100 meter free in my immediate future, but then, Lochte, to achieve his times, is training (per the article) 3 to 5 miles “most days, sometimes twice a day.”

I wonder what kind of training the OW swimmers are doing? The top finishers in the Beijing 10K OW swim are expected to complete the event at around (or under) an average 20 minute/mile pace. That kind of speed for more than 6 miles! Zowie.

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