Week 12 Coach’s Notes and Workouts

[chucifer]

Week 12: Coach’s Notes, Upcoming Events and Workouts

Swimmers,

Welcome to Week 12!

Over the weekend, we held our second Beginner and Intermediate Swimming Technique Clinic and we wanted to express our thanks to those of you who attended and provided great feedback on Sunday. If you feel that you learned something and had a great experience, please let us know! Likewise, if there’s something that you felt could have gone better, please let us know as well! We are here because of you and for you.

With this week also being a short week, I’d like to reiterate a few points. As a reminder, during this phase of our program, we are continuing to build our base and starting to work harder on speed and strength. To that end, there should be a distinct difference in the speeds at which we swim for the various sets. If a set says 60% effort and you swim that at the same speed and effort as a 90% effort, you will be hurting yourself down the road as you will have not developed your aerobic swimming capacity as much as we have designed into the workouts and you will have also not developed your upper speed/strength limits as well. Easy swimming is to be swum easily. Anything written to be swum hard or at 90%+ should be a hard effort. There should be dichotomy between your various speeds.

As far as technique goes, we are currently working on head position and pulling hand entry and acceleration through the water. During the longer distance sets or any set with a snorkel, focus on keeping your nose pointed to the bottom of the pool. The more head motion we generate, the more drag and snaking through the water we initiate. With regards to hand entry, in general, we dont care how the hand recovers over the water, but we want the hand to enter far out in front of the shoulder at ~95% max extension (no hyperextension). The biggest issue I’m seeing with many swimmers, is believing that it’s necessary to enter fingertips first by the head and then push the hand out in front underwater. This creates a ‘chicken wing’ effect as the shoulder to back flexion is incredibly acute and the elbow has to bend severely so that the hand can enter by the head. Instead, our suggestion is to have you extend their arm far out front and just drop your hand in without trying to slide your hand into the water. This relaxes the pressure on the upperback/shoulder and actually requires less body rotation as there’s less pinched chicken wing and more relaxation in the back and arm. If you need a coach to demonstrate this, please ask!

Something new this week that will continue going forward are scaled sets. Under each set, there will be suggestions for beginner and intermediate swimmers as doing the full workout may be too difficult for many to accomplish. Currently there are no benchmark times to define ‘beginner’ or ‘intermediate’ but often, if you are only reaching 1800-2000 yards per workout, consider doing the beginner scaled set. If you are doing 2000-2400 yards per workout, consider the intermediate scaled set.

Calculating Threshold Pace or TPace: This value is often defined as your 1000yd (or meter) time trial time divided by 10. TPace is often used as a benchmark for training and you will see it here and there for interval training as something similar to TPace + 0:10. This means that you take your Threshold Pace and add 10 seconds to define your interval time.
Example: If your Threshold Pace was 1:45 and the set is 5×100 on TPace + 0:10, that means that if you start when the clock is on 0:00, and when the clock reads 1:55 (1:45 +0:10), you will leave for your second 100. Your third 100 will leave on 3:50, your 4th will be on 5:45 and 5th will be on 7:40. What this means if you swam the first 100 in 1:40, you’ll get 15 seconds of rest. That also means that if you swam the 100 in 1:50, you only get 5 seconds of rest. Please make sure you know your TPace so that when these sets come up, you’ll be ready!

If you want to do the tests on your own, please feel free to upload your times here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1miz2skr2KbpwW9of_sVPEnV3jR5AZEIXWDOVL1oGpGw/edit?usp=sharing

As we have a number of new swimmers, I’d like to remind everyone that our workouts are designed to be done with certain key pieces of gear. Specifically, we use snorkels, paddles and bands and if you do not have any of these incredibly helpful tools, please visit this link to see our recommended gear: https://www.swimoutlet.com/dctmasters/

If you have any questions, please ask a coach or email us at masters@dctriclub.org

-Your MSP Coaches

Find us on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/groups/212967452505458/

Wednesday

Pre-Workout:
3×30 Resistance Cord Pulls
Warm Up:
300 EZ
***Intermediate and Beginner Swimmers may choose to reduce this to a 200

4×100 as 25 Kick on Stomach with Snorkel NO BOARD Arms Superman Position (If swimmer does not have a snorkel 25 Kick on Back), 25 Left Arm Only Freestyle, 25 Right Arm Only, 25 Swim
***Intermediate Swimmers may choose to reduce this to 3×100
***Beginner Swimmers may choose to reduce this to 2×100
**Kick should be done with arms extended in a superman position. Nose should be pointed downward with water level hitting crown of head
**Left and Right Arm Only drills should be done with the non pulling arm extended with hand in front of shoulder. DO NOT allow hands to come together.

Pre Main: 4×50 Descend on 10s Rest

Main 1
6×200 all on 30s rest
#1, #4: Snorkel + Paddles @ 60% Focus on Head Position and Hand Entry
#2, #5: Paddles @ 70%% Focus on Head Position before and after breathing
#3, #6: No Gear Build 60-90%
***Intermediate Swimmers may choose to reduce this to 5×200
***Beginner Swimmers may choose to reduce this to 4×200

Main 2
4×50 4 strokes Butterfly into 70% free on 15s Rest
200 80-90% on 30s Rest
4×50 4 strokes Butterfly into 70% free on 15s Rest
**If Swimmer cannot do Butterfly and does not want to try, substitute 8 strokes hard freestyle
***Intermediate and Beginner Swimmers may choose to reduce the 50s to 2×50 bookending the 200 Hard.

200 Warm Down

—

Friday

Pre-Workout:
3×30 Resistance Cord Pulls
Warm Up:
300 EZ
***Intermediate and Beginner Swimmers Swimmers may choose to reduce this to a 200

4×100 as 25 Kick on Stomach with Snorkel NO BOARD Arms Superman Position (If swimmer does not have a snorkel 25 Kick on Back), 25 Left Arm Only Freestyle, 25 Right Arm Only, 25 Swim
***Intermediate Swimmers may choose to reduce this to 3×100
***Beginner Swimmers may choose to reduce this to 2×100
**Kick should be done with arms extended in a superman position. Nose should be pointed downward with water level hitting crown of head
**Left and Right Arm Only drills should be done with the non pulling arm extended with hand in front of shoulder. DO NOT allow hands to come together.

Pre-Main
200 Build 60-90% by 50
**Try for four distinct speeds

Main 1
400 Pull with Snorkel & Paddles on 1min Rest
3×100 Descend 60-90% on TPace + 15s
200 Pull Only Paddles on 30s Rest
100 All Out
100 EZ
***Intermediate and Beginner Swimmers may choose to reduce the 400 and 3×100 to a 300 and 2×100 or a 200 and 2×100 respectively

Main 2: Two Times Through
200 Pull with Snorkel & Paddles on 30s Rest
100 Pull with Paddles on 20s Rest
100 as 50 @ 90%, 50 @ 70% on 20s Rest
**Both Main Sets are focusing on maintaining body position experienced on the longer Pull distances.
***Intermediate and Beginner Swimmers may choose to reduce the set to a 150, 100, and 50 repeated twice or just done once, respectively

200 Warm Down

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