Slowest rate ever?
 

Hi everyone.

I am wondering about the typical lowish rate that some older swimmers who couldn't care less about swimming fast would train.

More specifically. Any among you going as low as .5? I mean TT-Pro mode 1 @ .5, ie 30 strokes per minute as a cruising training tempo?

**edit**
I made a huge boo-boo. By slow rate, I obviously didn't mean 120spm, but rather 30 so it's mode 1 @ 2.0

I observe a lot of swimmers in our local pool and we have a set of people who you mention that swim about a mile of freestyle 3 times a week before hitting the sauna for a chat for an hour. Most of them use a pull buoy and they have a SR of between 35 and 45

Your first paragraph and 2nd paragraph seem at odds with each other. Isn't a TT setting in mode 1 @.5 a pretty fast rate? What are you getting at?

Sherry

Sherry, thank you so much. Wrong calculation. I wrote .5 (which is no less than 120 strokes per minute) I actually meant 2.0

So anyone training at 2.0?

Haha, Charles, remember me, I'm the wanna-be-sprinter...
well, when I'm not doing sets at between .47 and .67, I do some pretty slow stuff. Just two days ago I started swimming 25's and every other 25 I would move the TT .05, so I did the following...
2@1.8
2@1.85
2@1.90 and so on until I was doing a very demanding 2.25.
It was an amusing exercise. I'm gonna try to get to 2.5 tonight.

Why do you ask? What's on your mind?

edition: Sorry Charles, I responded but I now see that you qualified with older swimmers/couldn't care about swimming fast and I realize I may be older (42 compared to 15) but I certainly care about swimming fast.

Yeah no but yes, well all in all, your feedback is appreciated. I know of a few older friends who would love to swim perpetually. I had proposed the idea that the slowest rate they should aim for is 1.5, not any slower. One of them has suggested that 2.0 would work better for him.

Quite frankly, the 1.5-2.0 stuff, obviously, not my cup of tea. So I was wondering about the idea of being able to stay on balance whilst stroking every 2 seconds.

Really new to all this, so sorry if this is a stupid question, but on its own doesn't stoke rate have nothing to do with speed? thought speed was SR x SL??? I consider myself a slow swimmer at 48yrs of age my 1 mile is usually approx 31 mins and my 2 mile 63 mins. Quite a few yrs ago I realised if I try to speed up by increasing SR I slow down! but more importantly I realised if I slowed my SR down I speeded up! I'd been doing that for yrs to re overtake swimmers who came past me and as soon as I read the TI book the penny dropped, wish I'd read it 25 yrs ago!!!

thank you very much!

For some, those I have in mind, the quest is for absolute slowest possible achievable stroke. Faster than that, either as a consequence of greater SR or greater DPS (greater than what's required to swim your slowest possible speed), they get over their vo2max basically, and then they're forced to stop every 25 or 50m.

So I'm talking your easiest possible dps, at the slowest possible rate.

Kind of the other way around :)

How slow can someone go, whilst still feeling good and on balance, and usually it is achieved at which rate?

Your question was not at all stupid. I should have mentioned it. Initiating a thread always gets me nervous, I forget a bunch of things lol

I guess the pull buoy can make the difference for a lot of swimmers who cannot stay under vo2 max without one.