Finding Gears

A chill morning meant a misty session down at the pool this morning.

While it was chilly outside the pool, it was smoking hot inside it. 

See what I did there...

In all seriousness it was an interesting session down at the pool today watching the impact of increasing rest on speed. 

The session today was a fairly typical threshold session, between 12 and 20 x 100s, depending on the speed of the swimmer, broken up into sets of 3 or 4. The last 100 of each set was done as a sprint. The thing that was less typical, and where it got interesting, was the amount of rest people got.

At the start of the session there wasn't a lot of rest in between each 100, probably only 4 or 5 seconds if people were swimming at Threshold. As the session progressed, the amount of rest increased by about 4 seconds per set. By the last set people were getting around 20 seconds rest per 100.

With the rest being so small at the start of the set the sprint 100 was pretty much the same speed as the rest of the set. The idea of the set was that as the amount of rest increased the sprint 100s would get quicker. Of course, as the amount of rest increased people didn't have to get quicker, there was nobody forcing them. More than one swimmer slyly planned to stay slow and just enjoy the extra rest. However, the interesting thing was that despite that being the plan, nearly everybody did in fact get quicker as the rest increased.

What I found most interesting though was when the increase in speed occurred. For most of the group the magic number seemed to be about 12 seconds rest/100. With less than 12 seconds rest most of the group was simply hanging on, they had nothing left with which to find an extra gear for the sprint. 12 seconds or more of rest though and people starting recovering enough to find a bit more. By the time they were getting 16 to 20 seconds or rest/100 they were recovering enough to really give the sprint 100s a good push, often swimming 10 seconds per 100 quicker, despite being 2500m into the session. 

I found the progress of the session really interesting and a good demonstration of why the amount of rest you get can completely change the nature of a set. 20 x 100m done with 10 seconds rest and you are talking true threshold work. 10 x 100m with 30 seconds or more rest and you are probably talking more of a sprint session. 20 x 100m with a varying amount of rest (like today) and then we are a bit of both, a bit sprint and a bit threshold. Very simple, but very effective and something that was quite fun watching in demonstration today.