... ....as this dude gets older, he repeatedly discusses the mental aspects a better workout. Swimming and running are focused on in this article but I am sure cycling can be included.
Do you swim easily enough? <http://www.swimwellblog.com/archives/391> by Terry Laughlin Posted on April 9th, 2010 Do you swim easily enough?9.91012 In my 50s I’ve come increasingly to appreciate the value of swimming easily, and using the practice of ease for improvement. As I’ve focused more on combining ease and excellence I’ve realized that few people know how to swim easily . . . *well*. This is most likely because the “protestant work ethic” has been so strong in sports generally and swimming in particular. Virtually everyone who does swimming as a sport, including triathletes, swim too hard, too often. I first began to rethink what it meant to really swim easily in my early 50s. Amby Burfoot, executive editor of Runner’s World and a former Boston Marathon champion, related to me that the great Kenyan marathoners would warm up for workouts running at approximtely a 9-minute mile pace. For most of us that’s pretty fleet. But since they can run 26.2 miles at a pace of around 4:45 per mile it meant they were running at just over half their race speed. I compared that with my own usual warmup pace in swimming. In recent years my pace for a best-pace mile in a 25-yard pool (1650 yards) has been about 1:16 to 1:17 per 100. If I warmed up for my practices like a Kenyan runner I would be swimming at a pace of 2:15 to 2:20 per 100 yards. Instead my initial warmup pace has usually been near, or under 1:30 per 100. After learning about the Kenyans’ warmup pace from Amby I began to swim much more easily and slowly for the first 6 to 10 minutes of every practice. It resulted in achieving a much deeper state of relaxation at the beginning of practice, which I found increased the sense of relaxation I could maintain in nearly every practice item that followed, even the faster-paced sets. The second key lesson I learned about the value of ease was from Jonty Skinner, who was Director of Performance Science for USA Swimming, until last year when British Swimming hired him for a similar position as they gear up to host the Olympics. Jonty told me that most swimmers do their aerobic training too hard. He said that a reasonably-well-conditioned swimming (as distinguished from a former coach potato who just begins swimming) achieves peak aerobic fitness within 8 to 10 weeks of beginning a training cycle. Beyond that point, aerobic fitness doesn’t improve no matter how much aerobic training you do. After that point, Jonty said, the primary value of aerobic training is for restoration or recovery. The training that has the most influence on how you perform in a race is neurological – i.e. programming your nervous system to maintain certain combinations of Stroke Length and Stroke Rate. Maintaining a high level combination – long, efficient strokes, repeated at brisk tempos – is metabolically demanding. According to both Jonty and Mayo Clinic exercise physiologist Mike Joyner M.D. to improve your pace in races or timed efforts, it’s critical to swim at combinations of SL and SR that are near the limit of your current capability. That’s not only exacting in a neural sense, it’s also difficult physically. The critical contribution of aerobic training is to help you recover from one quality session for the next. If you swim just a bit too hard on an aerobic set, you won’t recover as well and will be too tired, or lack sharpness for your next high-performance training set. I followed Jonty’s advice in 2006, when I turned 55. I found myself swimming a lot more easily on most sets than I had previously. But that meant I was able to swim a LOT faster on certain sets where that was my intention. While doing so it became clear to me that virtually everyone else at my Masters group had a much narrower band of training speeds. They went too hard too often to be able to perform very high quality at key times. The benefits of easier swimming, so that I could swim faster at the right times, were obvious when I swam the Zone and National Championship races that far. My times were the fastest I had seen in some 12 years. Mike Joyner recalled advice he gave to a near-elite runner whose performances had been flat for several years. “Make your hard days harder and your easy days easier.” After doing so, that runner progressed to the elite level. ------------------------------ The New Busy is not the too busy. Combine all your e-mail accounts with Hotmail. Get busy.<http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?tile=multiaccount&ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_4> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CyclistsOfWilson-COWs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cyclistsofwilson-cows?hl=en.
