Ask yourself, do you know what your best 50 freestyle time is in yard or meters? How about your best average 50 sprint time? It is easy to think that in a triathlon these times don’t matter. After all, even the shortest open water swim is 500 yards, and an Olympic distance swim is 1500 meters. A 50 meter sprint is just 3% of an Olympic distance swim. Yet it is one of the most important indicators of how well you will do come race day.
In most workouts, you are swimming at a low Density. I swim several times, slowly and easily something is included in a diving game. If you accelerate hard to remember the things you remember doing to win and harder to follow. We are all, all, and he said the tough, hard to apply to remember. Sprint is almost primitive, most of have to deal with your instincts will tell you.
Considerationlast open water swim, and ask yourself, how much bandwidth did you actually have to think about swimming technique? So much of your brainpower is dedicated to swimming straight in a churning mess of white water and flailing arms and legs. Most of what is left is eaten away by the excitement of being in a long and exhausting race. You don’t have time to think about all those drills you have done or that complicated technique your coach is telling you to do. Chances are, if your optimal swimming form does not come naturally, it will not happen on race day.
You never need to swim at maximum speed in a triathlon swim, but you do need to develop the instincts to swim well without having to think. There is no better way to test and develop instinct than trying to hold your stroke at maximum speed. Your sprinting ability is an indicator of how much of your swim is memorized (with conscious effort) and how much is instinctive (without conscious effort). Ideally, you want your entire swim technique to be instinctive in order to free up your mind to think about strategy and avoid disasters like being hit in the face.
So, what does sprint swimming mean for triathletes? It is an all out stress on the limits of speed and movement in the water. This is much different from sprint competitive swimmers, who sprint to stress speed and strength in the water. They may sound similar, but they are very different. Competitive swimmers need to get stronger in order to go as quickly as possible over a short distance. Most of them have been swimming their entire lives, and so already have the instinct of swimming form. Conversely, most triathletes come from a non-swimming background. The speed of arm and leg movement in an all-out sprint is crucial to develop neuro-muscular pathways for swimming. Competitive swimmers need to train sprinting for the physical exercise. Triathletes need to train sprinting for the neurological exercise.
What does a sprint involve for triathletes? It involves repetitions of a 20-50 second swimming duration, as fast as you can go. You need to take enough rest between repetitions to ensure full heart rate recovery, but not enough rest to clear the lactic acid and tissue damage out of your muscles. This means you need to be resting anywhere from 2 times to 6 times longer than you are swimming. Incorporate a mix of workouts through this range to provide variety. Professional triathlete David Thompson does most of his 50s on a 2-minute sendoff (of which less than 30 seconds is spent swimming), but other workouts will be on a 1:30 sendoff and still others will be on a 3 minute sendoff.
The 20-50 second swimming duration and the amount of rest between repeats is critical. An effort less than 20 seconds is not enough to engage your anaerobic system. Thus, you don’t get nearly as tired or stressed. When you don’t get stressed, your mind doesn’t have a disaster to adapt to and you get no neuro-muscular benefit. Conversely, a 20-50 second effort hurts a lot but you are still able to maintain maximum speed. This forces your mind to say, “I’ve got to get better at being fast!” You may think an effort of a minute or greater would be even better yet because it hurts a lot more, but it is not. What happens if you push it to the max for too long is that you are forced to decrease the intensity. Likewise, if your repeat interval is less than 1:30, you won’t have time for your heart rate to recover and so you won’t be able to maintain a maximum effort. If you sprint too long or don’t take enough rest, you are driving your mind to say, “I’ve got to get better at being slow!”
If you’ve never sprinted before, what kind of pitfalls can you expect? Sprint newbies usually make one of two mistakes. Some try to retain everything they memorize about swimming form with brute force. As a result, they think so much about swimming right that they forget to swim fast. Others do the opposite. They ditch everything they’ve ever learned about swimming and flail their arms and legs as fast as possible, without care to the outcome. Ideally, you want a maximum of three swimming things in your mind on the first repeat. They better be important, because that’s all you get at max effort! As you get tired, let 2 of the 3 go, and just focus on the one most important thing. That one thing is the subject of many other articles! Over time, you are training your mind to accept that one important thing as law. It becomes easier to remember, because your mind recognizes it as the thing you always do when you are stressed.
Here’s what you can expect if you are doing the set right. The first repeat will feel pretty tough, but you will hang in there and still retain the 3 top things you are trying to improve. The second and third repeats will get progressively tougher. Soon thereafter, you will hit a wall. It is usually the 4th repeat, but may be the 5th or a little later. This repeat will hurt a lot more than the previous one, and you will go a lot slower. You will feel like you’ve been hit hard, and will have extreme difficulty holding onto that one thing that will make you faster. Many newbies make the mistake of looking at this as weakness. As a result, they view improvement as moving this inflection point to later in the set. But your inflection point doesn’t change much regardless of your fitness or swimming ability. The reasons why are in the systems of your body.
Here’s what is happening in your neuro/electrical systems in this set. On the first repeat, everything is a clean slate. Complex messages from your thinking mind get successfully converted into coordinated muscle movements, and your muscles are not busy sending complex signals to the brain about how much they hurt. But because you are going deep anaerobic, you develop a few muscle tears and lactic acid here and there. On the next repeat, you send the same messages, but the soldiers on the field (your muscle fibers) don’t receive them as well. If a fiber is damaged or lactic acid is in the way, your commands have to get re-routed, which dilutes and delays their effectiveness. In addition, your soldiers are sending you a damage report, which distracts from your ability to think about what you are doing.
The succession of damage and communication loss progresses linearly until you reach a tipping point. You hurt so bad that your muscles are overwhelming your nervous system with that lousy damage report. As a result, your mind is suddenly constrained in sending the commands you need to cope with the situation. And even the commands you can send are diluted and detoured beyond recognition in the nervous system and muscles because of the micro damage to tissue and lactic acid buildup. In short, you get suddenly and rapidly slower and it gets difficult to think of anything other than how bad it hurts. Your brain sees this as a disaster, and this is why newbies see it as weakness. But you must look at it differently. It is through this perceived disaster that your brain sees the need for instinctive change. So long as you are thinking about that one thing that will make you improve, it will become more instinctive over time.
There is nothing you can do to stop this process. If you do this set correctly, you should hit the wall every time. If you don’t, then you’ve wasted your valuable training time. It should be a badge of honor, not defeat. The portion of the set where you slow down is more dependent on physiology than ability. It will not change a lot as you become more fit and fast. But what will happen is that your average time over the entire set will decrease. And so long as your average time is decreasing, you are becoming a better open water swimmer, period.
So, how many repeats should you do? Ideally, you want to vary the number from a minimum of 8 up to a maximum of 20 for amateurs or maximum of 40 for pros. The number of repeats is not as important as reaching that inflection point and fighting through it with everything you have got until your stroke completely falls apart. You may want to stop when you feel your technique start to slip, but this is a mistake. Your brain is very receptive to re-programming in that zone when you are too tired for a perfect stroke but can still think of that one thing to do better. Once you cannot think at all it is time to stop, regardless of how many repeats you have done. If this happens in less than 8 repeats, you should have a goal of doing 8 repeats in the future.
Hopefully, this article has enhanced your understanding of the importance of sprint swimming for triathletes. Sprinting is a crucial supplement to your existing training regimen, as it is the best opportunity to take all that you have learned in all of your coaching sessions and drills and make them instinctive. However, speed based training is useless if it is not partnered with basic technique. It is recommended that a quarter of your workouts be sprint based, with the remaining workouts at lower effort levels. You might think such difficult all-out workouts are terrible and unexciting, but they are actually a lot of fun. It hurts, but you get thrilled by seeing that water move past you faster than you have ever seen before. And that feeling of speed is always entertaining! Until next time, happy training.