Months ago I started to work on this blog post about my training philosophy for age group swimmers. I knew this would be possibly a controversial topic. There are many differing opinions on how to train swimmers of all levels. I will be completely honest and say that part of my delay in completing this blog entry is due to being unsure if I wanted to deal with the differing opinions. While I respect and welcome well thought out opinions expressed in a polite manner, I know there are some out there who can be very unaccepting of different opinions and as a result are downright rude and disrespectful when expressing their beliefs. Those are the types of discussions I do not want and what kept me from posting this. For those willing to have a respectful discussion, please do comment as I am open to your ideas. My ideas while still grounded in the same basic beliefs have changed over time to adjust to new knowledge and what I think children need and want today.To start I would like to provide a little background of my own swimming as I believe this shaped the foundation of my philosophy as a coach. While tracking the volume of yardage was commonplace for me, I did not come from a background that did extreme amounts of yardage. Probably the peak weekly yardage I did was in high school with my high school program and it reached around 50,000 to 60,0000 yards. Looking back, I would say that 20-25% of that was what I would consider garbage yardage today. It may have had a purpose, but I don't recall one. My club practice volume peaked at around 40,000 to 45,000 yards weekly. Part of the difference was that we did not typically do doubles with my club team, while my high school team had doubles 2-3 times a week. Going back to my age group swimming days, pre-high school, I came from a program that emphasized much of what would be considered today's USA Swimming IMX program. Without training extreme volume, we were encouraged and prepared to swim all events and distances. That is where I learned to love distance free, 400 IMs and 200 flys. Moving forward into college, I still trained as distance swimmer, but we again were not a volume based program. Our weekly average yardage was slightly higher than my club experience (mainly due to 2 doubles a week). We did do the typical increased volume during a winter break training, but that was not the norm throughout our season. In summary, I was introduced to a training philosophy that trained distance and IM while avoiding extreme yardage volume. Note that I did not mention much about short race pace training. While we would do sprint sets occasionally, it was not a large part of my training experience, good or bad.
Now, onto my coaching experience. As I am now in my 18th year of coaching, I have seen a slow positive change in the way age group swimmers are trained. I think when I started to coach the prevailing popular approach was to mainly increase training volume over time to develop senior swimmers. In some ways, treat young age group swimmers like mini senior swimmers. While increasing the volume swimmers train is important, I think often the curve was too steep. More and more, I am gladly hearing about coaching not increasing the number of practices or even number of hours practiced. It is more about better utilizing the time already scheduled. For younger swimmers there should be more down time within a practice, as much more instructional attention is necessary (and they are slower). Thus, the density of practice time being actually filled with swimming will increase as a swimmer gets older and more experienced. I would much rather see a swimmer increase and exhaust their training capacity in this manner before adding any additional practice sessions. As a coach of mainly swimmers ages 10-12, I believe offering 6 practices a week ranging from 1.5-2 hours in length is more than adequate. It is understood and expected that most swimmers will miss 1-2 of those practices a week due to other activities. I strongly believe that is acceptable as these children should be involved in other activities and sports. They do not need to be making a commitment to only swimming just yet. If they choose to do that, that is fine, but that is the exception and not the norm. Within the 2 hour practices is when we take more time for instructional work or just plain fun and games. Often 30 minutes of that is used to just work on technique or some type of fun game. They already have put in 1-1.5 hours of hard work. Another aspect I find increasingly becoming more true is that swimmers today take longer to understand and apply the various training concepts. What I mean is it takes more time before a swimmer understands and independently knows how and when to change intensity (learning the energy zones however you teach it). I think many swimmers start understanding the concepts long before they learn how to make their bodies apply that knowledge properly. It can be frustrating as a coach, but we must be extremely patient as we will feel like we are repeating the same lesson hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. The last aspect that I truly believe and I think is common amongst most coaches now is training from an IM perspective. We are trying to create well rounded swimmers that can do any event or distance. Yes, they will have favorites and ones they are better at. However, we create a system that allows them to respect and be comfortable swimming anything.
The last item I would like to address is USRPT(Ultra Short Race Pace Training) for age group swimmers. While I have not researched the details of it much, I will provide my limited opinion. I strongly believe that part of what we must teach is how to swim fast. One of the best ways to do that is by doing short, fast swims at times. That is where I think USRPT is an awesome tool for age group swimmers when used in moderation. However, USRPT as the sole or dominant training approach I think is detrimental to the long term development of age group swimmers. I believe reasonable training volume above and beyond USRPT is critical for long term success. I think USRPT is something that can be increasingly incorporated for a swimmer in the later stages of their careers (college and beyond). We are seeing many swimmers in that demographic succeed with it. That is great and I think we must remember that they have not trained like that their entire careers. We are only starting to now see swimmers use USRPT predominately from a young age. I am curious to see how their long term development progresses. Maybe I will be wrong and then it will be up to me to adjust as I hope I am continually doing as new knowledge is learned.
