By David

I was pleased to receive a comment from Brent to the article on “The Case for Distance Training”. It would be best to read his comment in full, but if you are in a hurry I have attempted to extract his crucial points and copied them in the summary below.

“Please tell me – what does 20,000 or even 14,000 yards a day do for a sprint swimmer? Why would someone racing for less than a minute need to train aerobically so much? This article talks a lot about who is training with this much yardage, but not about why they do it. I am not saying that lots of yardage is never good, but it isn’t for everyone. Fact: distance training decreases maximal stroking power. Fact: maximal stroking power is continually shown to be very highly correlated to maximal swimming velocity. In my opinion, the benefits of lots of yardage are not worth the loss of power in sprinters. Right now I feel like quality trumps quantity for sprinters.”

Brent is quite right. No one should swim 100 kilometers every week just because Phelps or Lochte are reported as swimming that far. That’s asking for far too big a leap of faith. Of course there should be a good reason. After all it’s a bloody long way to swim. Only a complete moron would do it without some idea of it physiological outcome.

So what does happen when an athlete swims 100 kilometers a week for 25 weeks a year? In the five years it takes to develop an international level of aerobic fitness that’s 125 weeks and 12,500 kilometers; or New York to Los Angeles three and a bit times. Here is a simplified description of the physiological changes that occur. Remember though I’m not a doctor. However the descriptions are accurate even if they are not couched in medical terms.

First there is a 40% increase in the density of the muscle’s capillary bed. A detailed study completed in Poland recently concluded with the following statement. “Endurance trained men have 821 capillaries per mm2, that is 40.3% more than untrained men (585 per mm2).”

A similar Manchester Metropolitan University study concluded that “endurance exercise training results in profound adaptations of the cardio-respiratory and neuromuscular systems that enhance the delivery of oxygen from the atmosphere to the mitochondria and enable a tighter regulation of muscle metabolism. These adaptations effect an improvement in endurance performance that is manifest as a rightward shift in the ‘velocity-time curve’. This shift enables athletes to exercise for longer at a given absolute exercise intensity, or to exercise at a higher exercise intensity for a given duration.”

So what is the practical effect of these changes? One National Champion I coached began by swimming 26×200 meter sets in 2.45 with a heart rate of 160. Four years later the same swimmer was swimming the same set on the same interval, at the same heart rate in 2.16; same effort 18% faster. All the physiological changes mentioned above had occurred. This swimmer could now swim at a 100 meter rate of 1.08 without dipping into her anaerobic mechanisms. Her base aerobic pace had improved from 1.23 per 100 to 1.08. When she added anaerobic training to that she quickly came down 13 seconds to 1.10 when she was training at 1.23 pace and 55 when her training aerobic pace was 1.08.

At its most simple the faster you can swim aerobically the further ahead you start and the faster you will swim when you dip into your anaerobic and speed energy systems. And that’s true whether the event is 50 or 100 or 200 or 1500 meters.

There are two frustrating aspects of Brent’s comments. The argument that quality trumps quantity is just bloody insulting. I’ve coached three female swimmers who could swim 100×100 meters going every 1.30 and average 1.06. In one set the last 2×100 were in 59. One of the swimmers was an Olympic Gold Medalist, another a Pan Pac Bronze Medalist and the third a Pan Pac semi-finalist. Their time of 1.06 for that set was probably better quality than sprint swimmers could swim for ten of them. For a well trained athlete further does not mean slow. Any coach would be hard pushed to describe a 1.06 pace for 10,000 meters as lacking quality.

The second frustration is the argument that long distance swimmer “decreases maximal stroking power”. This is a similar argument to the “you’ll lose your speed” argument. Arthur faced that comment all the time. His curt reply was, “Where will it go?” Brent’s claim ignores the fact that most distance coaches have only ever argued for 50% of the athletes time to be spent doing big distances. The other weeks, the other 50%, focus on power, speed and anaerobic conditioning. That’s plenty of time to take care of the speed and power aspects of the athlete’s preparation. This summer I coached a 33 year old male swimmer to two Master’s world records in the 50 and 100 meters butterfly. Before his swims we spent ten weeks doing all the stuff Barry would drool over. For ten weeks he never swam further than 16,000 in a week. But he did it on top of a steady aerobic base. That’s why it worked.

I once asked Arthur, “What’s the most important stage of your training program?” He answered, “The speed-work period of course; because that’s when you get ready to race.” That’s from the man who invented long distance training.