Technique and speed

Well done for all of your efforts last week in the prime number set.  It was a tough set, especially for lanes 2 and 3, so well done for sticking with it.  Also, well done for coping with the change of lanes.  It can be a little disorienting to have to cope with a different size of lane and turn the opposite way round but it is good practice to mix it up as well as allowing Doug and myself to have a different look at your stroke.

For those of you that follow 220 Triathlon on Twitter you may have seen their tweet this week about Dave Scott’s top tips for improving your triathlon swimming.  It is not a new article, and I have written about it before, but I still like it and I think it is always good to be reminded every once in a while about the basics.  I especially like the comments about keeping your hand entry a little bit wider and the visualisation of the eyeball in your elbow to help you remember to keep your elbows high underwater.  The high cadence drills of head-up frontcrawl and straight-arm recovery are good for practising exactly these and we will be doing them again this week.

The main set this week will be some steady-paced 150s with some 200 pursuit swims to inject some speed at the end of the session.  Please do use the opportunity on the steadier-paced swims to think about that nice high elbow (try Dave Scott’s eyeball visualisation) and also trying to keep that going when you increase your stroke rate on the faster swims.

See you Saturday,

Rob

Back to work

After the time trials last week we are going back to work using some of the information we learned last week, specifically your current Critical Swim Speed (CSS).  As many of you will know your CSS is your lactate threshold swim speed, which is usually the pace you can sustain for a 1,500m swim.  We estimated your current CSS using your 400m and 100m time trial results and this was in the results I circulated last week.  If you didn’t do the time trials then you may know your CSS already but if not the average CSS for lane 1 is about 1m 26s/100m, for lane 2 is about 1m 37s, for lane 3 about 1m 44s and for lane 4 about 1m 55s.

The main set this week is return of the prime numbers set of 100s where prime numbered 100s (i.e. 2, 3, 5, 7, …) are swum on a slightly shorter turnaround than non-prime numbered 100s (i.e. 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, …)  I would like you to swim the shorter turnaround 100s slightly faster than the others.  Aim for a 4s difference between the faster and slower 100s with faster 100s at 2s faster than your CSS and slower 100s at 2s slower than your CSS. This is a good long set and should help work on improving your CSS.

See you Saturday,

Rob