Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer based out of Victoria, BC. In feeding his passion for swimming, he has developed YourSwimBook, a powerful log book and goal setting guide made specifically for swimmers. Sign up for the YourSwimBook newsletter (free) and get weekly motivational tips by clicking here.
In today’s Coach’s Intel Dan Schinnerer of Bucknell University shares a sprint/middle distance set. He has been the head coach at Bucknell since 2006. Before that he was a part of the program at Michigan, where he apprenticed under Bob Bowman and Jon Urbanchek.
Here is the swim workout:
We focus on quality/race pace swimming on Wednesday practices and below is a set we have done on multiple occasions both with our sprinters and our middle distance type swimmers. This set usually would come after about 2500 yards of general warm-up that would include swimming, drilling, kicking, and pulling.
We would also do some sort of “pre-set” in order to get heart rates elevated and muscles firing.
The set is:
4×25@1:00 Dive fast.
Focusing on relaxed speed. These could be done to hand finish or foot finish with a turn. Whichever we wanted to emphasize for the day. Sometimes we would time the 25s but more often focus on giving feedback about stroke rate, break-outs, turns, finishes.
From the 25s, we go right into:
4×50@2:00 Fast from push. Swimmers should try for at very least 2nd 50 of 100 goal time or even better 1/2 100 goal time. Often swimmers will really get rolling on these coming out of the 25s.
From the 50s, we go right into:
4×75@4:00 Dive fast. Again coming out of the 50s the swimmers are usually really ready to crank the first 75. The goal then is to sustain the efforts throughout. If the swimmer has done everything correctly up until the 75s it should really be difficult to sustain the times and turns into a great lactate set.
Following the set, we would typically do 1500-2000 yards of lower level aerobic swimming.
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Got a workout or set you’d like to share with your fellow coaches? Send it on it to Olivier at [email protected]
Did this practice with our masters group this morning. They really enjoyed it, and I can tell that they were hurting for the 3rd and 4th 75s. I am not looking forward to doing it myself as all fly later this morning…wish me luck.
Ugh…
14.5 on the 4 x 25s
29.5-30.4 on the 50s
:48 on the first 75
:50 on the second
Only made a 50 of fly on the third (finished free in :51)
Only make a 25 of fly on the fourth (finished free in :52)
Might try it in reverse order next time.