Conf: Freestyle
From: Linda Hopson
Date: Friday, October 27, 2006 12:44 PM

At yesterday’s Master’s workout my coach said, “You need to be more like 75% catch-up.” I replied, “The other coach said I was doing too much catch-up.” Her response: “You are. You’re doing 100% catch-up. Try to do 75% catch-up.” I tried to move faster and didn’t feel I had enough time for the catch. How much catch-up should I be aiming for?

From: Brian Vande Krol
Date: Friday, October 27, 2006 02:20 PM

An important consideration for getting faster is over what distance? Also when do you want to be your fastest?

Assuming that your coaches are not TI oriented, you’ll need to take some responsibility for self- coaching and modifying practice to meet your goals.
If you are trying to swim your fastest 50, you can give up some of the overlap in your arms. If you are trying to go faster for 1000 yards, you will want to keep more of that overlap and strike a balance between efficiency, speed, and your fitness.

If your goal is to swim fast for an event in the next two months, focus on rehearsing how you want those races to feel with short-rest repeats, swimming as fast as you can efficiently. During warm-ups and warm-downs focus on swimming slowly and maximizing your efficiency.

If your goal is longer-term, focus more on developing your technique. After warming up with drills, do a main set that emphasizes a low SPL, and leaves you easily able to carry on a conversation at the end of each repeat. Allow plenty of recovery between repeats so that you can focus on technique, rather than surviving. From time to time, throw in some short sprints (25 yds) with full recovery. This will help you adapt more quickly to the higher speeds and harder efforts that will come later as you approach your race.

As you increase your pace, adjust your technique as follows:

1. Reduce rotation, say from 70 degrees each direction, to 50 degrees. This will enable you to increase stroke rate.

2. Quicken your recovery. As your arm comes out of the water, keep it relaxed, and accelerate its movement to entry.

3. Try for an earlier catch (not an earlier pull). As soon as your hand reaches maximum extension, tip your fingers down and elbow up to achieve the "high elbow anchor." Leave it there until your spearing arm drives past it.

4. Time your kick to your spearing motion.
As you try to swim faster with the above techniques, you’ll probably find that your overlap is naturally reduced. And no matter what your primary technical focus, keep a constant peripheral goal of being relaxed.

From: Terry Laughlin
Date: Tuesday, October 31, 2006 06:58 AM

Brian is right that you’ll naturally reduce stroke length and overlap as you swim shorter race distances and practice repeats. Understand that this change in SL should not be intentional, but a natural accommodation to the higher Stroke Rate you’ll use in sprints.

Consider this: The most successful sprinter of all time Alexander Popov took the same number of strokes in his 50-meter races - 32 - as Grant Hackett averaged in his 1500-meter world record swim. Of course Popov surfaced much farther down the pool after his dive than Hackett would have after each flip turn.

The key to Popov's 12-year world domination of the sprints was his strategy of training to be able to maintain his speed in the final 15 meters of races while everyone else was slowing down. He won countless 100-meter races in the final 15 meters because of this. He didn’t maintain his speed longer because he was fitter, but because during the first 75 meters he swam with longer strokes, more rotation and more overlap, which reduced his energy expenditure.

Popov developed this edge by training millions of meters at a level of stroke efficiency the rest of us can only dream of – 24 SPL in a 50-meter pool. While holding that stroke length, Popov practiced "extra" rotation and overlap at surprisingly slow – for him – speeds. Though I'm a distance swimmer I've chosen to train as Popov did, spending the majority of my training time practicing the greatest efficiency possible. Sometimes this means swimming with more overlap than feels instinctive. When I want to swim faster, I keep my efficiency as high as I can, but avoid doing anything that inhibits me from swimming my fastest. I continually work the margins of that tradeoff trying to make it more effectively.

I should also point out that in the early stages of a 1500-meter race I'll swim with a longer, more “patient” stroke, more, rotation and overlap, then adjust those in response to fatigue and pace as the race proceeds, for which my practice sets have prepared me.

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