Set Types

Swim Set Types and the Adaptations They Produce

This article is part of a series on why we do the things we do, the series explains set types and periodization through the lens of lactate metabolism. Fatigue is more nuanced than simply being about lactate accumulation and consumption and these articles are getting old. But I have left them in place because while lactate is not itself a cause of fatigue, it is closely related to the causes of fatigue in events from 1 minute to around 30 minutes.

The previous article can be found here, the first article of the series is here. 

USA Swimming has adopted a set classification system that has seven levels. Recovery (REC), Endurance Level 1 (EN1), Endurance Level 2 (EN2), Endurance Level 3 (EN3), Sprint Level 1 (SP1), Sprint Level 2 (SP2) and Sprint Level 3 (SP3). Other sports and other countries use slightly different classifications but most systems break out along similar lines. Each category aims at a slightly different set of adaptations, as a result the set types have characteristic lengths, rests and intensities.

It is important to realize that different sets are doable in different amounts. As we will see in later articles, the stress induced by SP2 sets is much higher than that induced by EN2 sets. SP2 sets put a big hole in your schedule, recovering from them both during and between workouts is difficult. Conventional wisdom holds for this and other reasons to hold off on the more stressful work until relatively close to the main competition. But more on that later.

Endurance Sets

The bulk of any program in terms of yards, and to a lesser extent in terms of time spent, consists of endurance sets. These types of sets are meant to lead mostly to the aerobic adaptations pointed out earlier. In terms of the bathtub model, you are trying in increase the size of your bathtub drain.

REC

Recovery swims are done at very easy paces and the rest intervals during the set are usually not critical. In an acute situation, a recovery set is used after a hard set or at a meet after a race. In this use the purpose is to help rid your muscles of lactate and other byproducts of effort. It has been shown that active recovery in the form of easy swimming is more effective than passive rest at lactate removal. In the long run recovery sets are used to loosen up or help get rid of stiffness in the days following a hard workout or competition. It is meant to help you recover for the next workout.

Many drill sets can also be thought of as recovery sets. In terms of your physiology this is true, even though the drill will have other useful adaptations outside of your aerobic metabolism. Recovery sets tend to increase fat metabolism at a given speed. Fat metabolism is not addressed in our bathtub model but becomes quite important in races over 40 minutes or so in length. Recovery sets address all the aerobic adaptations but on a minute per minute basis, induce adaptations at a lower rate.

EN1

EN1 type sets are also good at inducing the aerobic adaptations, but due to increased intensity they are more effective at creating these changes than the recovery sets. The intensity of these sets is from around 90 to 95% of critical pace for the stroke you are swimming. This can vary widely with the amount of rest and length of the swim however, longer repeat distances with short rest mean you can swim a little slower and get this adaptation. Longer rest for shorter repeats mean you need to swim a bit faster, closer to your critical pace. The duration of the sets needed to induce adaptations is over 16 minutes and rests are short, generally 20 seconds or less to keep your body from recovering. You want to keep your hr up for an extended time. These sets improve fat metabolism as the recovery sets do but not quite as well. These sets also increase the number of mitochondria in your muscles, as discussed before the mitochondria are the power plants of the cell and are where all the aerobic metabolism takes place. Having more mitochondria means a bigger bathtub drain and pays dividends in every distance of race.

EN2

EN2 type sets are done very near critical pace. A little faster than critical pace for shorter repeats and a little under critical pace for longer repeats. EN2 sets are the most effective way to develop your aerobic metabolism. Minute for minute, the best bang for your buck in aerobic developments, the stress is moderate and they can usually be performed multiple times in a week without causing problems for the athletes. The typical set length for EN2 sets is 16 to 40 minutes. Depending ont the set structure, rests can be from 5 to 40 seconds, or even up to one minute on a very long repeat. In terms of our model, EN2 pace work induces the greatest adaptations in mitochondria, it makes your bathtub drain bigger. It is also the best training pace for raising your MLSS, this is only natural since these sets are done close to MLSS pace. MLSS and critical pace are very close to each other.

EN3

EN3 sets are done at or very close to VO2max. As discussed before this is where your energy metabolism is at full tilt, the firehose is open, the drain is draining and overflow drain is draining as fast as possible. In fact it seems like this should be all we ever do. But like everything there is a downside, the EN3 sets are high stress and can be done in somewhat limited quantities. If we were to continue to do them they would bring on stagnation more quickly than other types of sets.

EN3 sets are also usually 16 minutes long but there is significant amounts of rest in them, up to 1 to 1 ratio of work to rest. Since your hr often gets very close to its max, this type of set affects your heart function. The amount of plasma in your blood goes up, maximum stroke volume is improved, and since you are working near VO2max, your VO2max level is improved.

Sprint Sets

If all you ever did were open water swims an hour or longer, you could pretty much end the discussion here in terms of metabolism and energy production. Go off and develop your aerobic metabolism and be happy and healthy live a good life out there with the sea critters and the jellyfish. Of course, there is more than one way to look at things and sprint sets have uses for marathon type swimmers, it's just that those benefits don't have to do with metabolism. However, the masters swimmers, most of their events are from one to four minutes and involve high lactate levels. A bathtub overflowing just at the last stroke. So to be sharp for raceday sprint work is included. Like sprint racing itself, sprint training also creates high lactate levels.

Work on critical paces has shown that doing a lot of sprint work, the SP1 and SP2 levels can be detrimental to your aerobic fitness. So at the extremes, if all you ever did was sprint work, your aerobic metabolism would get worse and you could actually end up slower in your chosen event for it. The mechanisms once again are not exactly clear, if nothing else, sprint work takes a lot of time in your workout. Thirty minutes spent on an SP1 set would not be unusual, but that is 30 minutes not spent developing your aerobic metabolism. There are other more in depth mechanisms used to explain why, but they are all offshoots of, if you do less aerobic work for one reason or another, your aerobic metabolism won't work as well. And included in that "One reason or another," is a 40 minute set of sprint work.

This is one of the major reasons why coaches tend to switch emphases a bit as the year goes on, too much sprint work early in the season could deteriorate your aerobic metabolism and leave you a step behind come the big race. How much istoo much sprinting? How early is too early to start to emphasize sprint work? That will be discussed in a follow-on article on periodization.

SP1

SP1 sets are also called lactate production sets, these sets are intense and faster than MLSS speed but due to the set structure with shorter intervals and longish rests, the lactate levels don't get too terribly high. On these you should have some lactate type fatigue setting in during the set but not so much that your arms start to burn and really struggle. You should be able to maintain a pretty consistent pace through the set. In terms of our bathtub model, you would say that these sets are meant to increase the size of the firehose and to an extent they also make your bathtub bigger. These ets also induce some aerobic changes, although in magnitude probably less than the recovery sets do. SP1 sets are high stress and can be taken in small doses for a good chunk of the season.

SP1 sets have intervals of 25 yards to possibly out to 200 yards. The speeds are at about 95% of max speed and the total time of an SP1 set would be 20 minutes or more. However rest durations on SP1 sets are equal to or twice the duration of the work interval. So of the 20 minutes half or more of the time would be taken up by rest between swims. These types of sets are usually done earlier in the season than the very hardest work that is the SP2 work.

SP2

SP2 sets or lactate tolerance sets are the hardest sets a swim group will do. They are similar to the distances and speeds of competition events. The idea behind a lactate tolerance set is to get accustomed to the type and amount of pain you might experience in a race. In this way you increase the size of your bathtub. It is thought that your muscles get better at buffering acid and that your brain resets the "STOP!" point on how much you will take and still swim.

SP2 set distances are usually directly relevant to your chosen event. An SP2 sets for a 200 person would consist of 150s to 300s, for a 100 person it would be 75s to 150s. These swims can be done straight through or perhaps broken up with 5 to 15 second rests in the repeat. The rest intervals usually involve active recovery and are 2 to 5 times as long as the swim interval. The effort is 100% for these sets and the lactate levels induced are quite high.

SP3

SP3 sets exist largely outside of the bathtub model. These types of swims are prominent but really don't do THAT much in terms of our bathtub model. The most applicable thing they do is to indirectly increase the size of the firehose. I say indirectly because these types of swims work on your neuromuscular system mostly. They enable you to turn over faster and recruit muscles faster. In a bit of an odd situation, while the SP3 sets are the fastest ones we do, they are not the most stressful. The intervals on SP3 work top out at 25 yards and the rest is complete, a work to rest ratio of 1 to 5 to 1 to 8. Since these sets are lower stress these are actually included both early and late in the season.

Early in the season, before your fitness has really come around you can still work on SP3 without inducing a lot of stress, the work on your turnover and coordination is quite effective and this type of work continues to a degree all through the year. SP3 sets also become a mainstay in the taper, in a taper the general idea is to reduce the training loads so your body gets into the supercompensated state, but you also want to do some fast swimming as well to keep your feel for the water, the SP3 sets can fit the bill late in the taper.

Please see below a summary chart of all the different set types.

Type	Repeat Distance	Rest	Speed	Total Set Time	Exertion (1-10)	Sample Set
REC	Any	Any	Easy	Any	6	400 IM pull / 400 IM kick / 400 IM order
EN1	Any	5 - 30 secs	90 - 95% critical Pace	20 - 120 mins	7-8	800 / 8 x 100 / 600 / 6 x 100 / 400 / 4 x 100 (:20 rest on all)
EN2	25 - 3000 yds	10 - 45 secs	95 - 103% critical pace	30 mins	8-9	15 x 100 on Critical Pace + 0:15 holding Critical Pace
EN3	50 - 2000 yds	30 - 240 secs	>103% critical pace	20 mins	10	3 x 100 max (:05) 4 mins rest between sets
SP1	25 - 200 yds	30 secs - 3 mins	95% max pace	15 - 45 mins	9	5 x 50 at goal pace (:30) 1 minute between sets
SP2	~ Race Distance	2 - 5 mins	~ 100%	15 - 45 mins	11	3 x 100 at goal 200 race pace (2:00) 4:00 active rest between sets
SP3	10 - 25 yds	1 - 5 mins	Max	15 - 45 mins	Ample Recovery	12 x 25 on 2:00 from a dive

Pitfalls

So now that you have an idea of the general structure of workouts we can look at some ways in which modifying a workout on the part of a swimmer can change what the workout does and may change it significantly from what the coach had intended.

Resting too Little

A common thing that might happen is if the coach puts up an SP1 set. It might be:

12 x 50 (:40) FAST!

Without more input from the coach is is entirely foreseeable that the swimmers may decide it is too much rest and shorten the interval. What is probably happening is that the swimmers don't understand how fast "FAST" is supposed to be in this case. The swimmers swam it "moderately fast" and don't think they are working hard enough. So they swim slower than the coach intended and rest less than the coach intended.

What happens is that the high quality SP1 set turns into an EN1 or EN2 set. The problem with that is that there are not enough yards in this set to get aerobic adaptations from it. So you get a set that is neither here nor there, not fast enough to increase the size of your tub and not long enough to make a bigger drain.

Swimming too Slowly

Swimming too slowly might happen if the coach puts this EN2 set up on the board.

15 x 100 on critical pace + :20

Without further instruction and if the swimmer does not recognize it as an EN2 set, then the set may end up being swum too slowly. Instead of swimming them near his critical pace and getting 15 seconds rest he may find it easier to swim them at 10 seconds slower than critical pace and get 10 seconds rest. In doing so he turns the set from a an EN2 set with very profound effects on his mitochondria, into an EN1 set with much less of an effect and a lower quality.

Swimming too Fast

So the coach puts this on the board:

2 x 800 swim easy (:30)

The swimmer doesn't recognize or doesn't understand set design and so does this at a pace very near to his critical pace. Or how about the swimmer goes out and does the first 400 faster than his critical pace, the 2nd 400 is slower than that and the 2nd 800 repeat is a very difficult slog but he manages to get within 2 seconds of critical pace. He swam that fast because because he "Can't go that slow". Did he do the right thing? Faster is always better, right?

Well what we didn't know about the swimmer is that he is a 51 year old sprinter with excellent times in the 50 and 100 and has struggled his whole life with big yards workouts. So while this set was of decent quality, the BIG main set for the week is in two days on Thursday morning when the coach planned on a 40 minute SP2 set. Come thursday, our swimmer in question is still not quite recovered and just doesn't feel right during the big set for the week.

So those are three problems that can arise when the swimmers don't understand what the underlying purpose of a set is. A problem by the way that YOU my dear reader won't have any longer because you are now versed in a nearly universal language of set construction.

What's Next?

How we change the mix of set types through the year to peak for the big race.

Training Adaptations

Adaptations to Training

If you are having trouble following these terms or the theme, please check out the previous article on lactate metabolism.

Having established the model for lactate metabolism and defined MLSS, aerobic and anaerobic, how do those things affect performance?

Lactate metabolism is the major fatigue mechanism mode for swim races from 100 to 1500 yards. As shown in the chart below, aerobic metabolism is responsible for more of the energy used the longer the race takes. Improvements in the rate of athletes' aerobic metabolism will give corresponding improvements in performance. In races shorter than 30 seconds, contractility and speed are limiting rather than lactate accumulation. In races over ~45 minutes, glycogen depletion can be a limiting factor. For masters swimming, most of the races are right in the range where adaptations to lactate metabolism will have benefits. In terms of the bathtub model, we want adaptations that will keep the tub from overflowing before the end of the race.

Time	30s	60s	2 mins	4 mins	10 mins
% Aerobic Energy Supply	20	30	50	65	85
% Anaerobic Energy Supply	80	70	50	35	15

The goal is to have the bathtub overflow JUST at the very end of the race; just as you touch the wall. So in contrast to MLSS as discussed previously, swim races are not done at an effort that elicits a steady lactate level. The races are done significantly over MLSS intensity, how much over depends on the length of the race. In most swim races the bathtub is continually being filled until the end of the race, actually for a few seconds after as well.

How do we get faster?

In terms of lactate as the limiting factor in race performance, there are three different avenues to pursue

1. Increase your lactate tolerance (get a bigger bathtub)
2. Increase the rate at which lactate can be used by aerobic metabolism (get a bigger drain)
3. Increase the whole thing from top to bottom, the firehose, tub, drain and even the overflow drain.

Aerobic Adaptations

What exactly happens when we pursue aerobic adaptations; how does the drain get bigger?

Central Adaptations

Central adaptations are changes that happen away from the working muscles, the ones listed here affect the heart.

Increased Plasma Volume

The first change is an increase in blood plasma volume. Plasma is the fluid part of your blood. In general terms, increased plasma volume will make your blood move around better. Better able to deliver oxygen to your working cells, better able to take excess lactate from those working cells and bring it to other parts of your body to be used for energy.

Cardiac Hypertrophy

The second central adaptation is “cardiac hypertrophy,” use it three times in a sentence and that word is yours, work it into conversations often! Cardiac hypertrophy is the term for when your heart gets bigger. Bigger as in the amount of blood it can hold at once. In healthy people, a larger heart is a more efficient heart, you can move more blood with each beat.³ That makes it even easier to get more oxygen rich blood to your working cells.

Improved Ejection Fraction

The third central adaptation is improved ejection fraction. After you stop giggling, you should know that ejection fraction refers to how much of the blood in your heart gets squeezed out with each beat. A higher ejection fraction is better, it will take fewer beats to get the same amount of blood to the working muscles. When you go to your favorite local cardiologist to get a stress test, one of the things he measures is your ejection fraction.

Peripheral Adaptations

Increased Capillary Density

The first peripheral aerobic adaptation is increased muscle capillary density. This change means more tiny blood vessels penetrating the muscle bed. In turn this means a better flow of oxygenated blood to the muscles and a better flow of lactate and CO2 away from the muscles.

Increased Mitochondrial Density

The second peripheral aerobic adaptation is increased mitochondrial density. Mitochondria are the the parts of the cell where energy generation happens. All the aerobic metabolism reactions we have discussed occur in the mitochondria of a cell. More and better mitochondria mean that your aerobic metabolism is more capable of grabbing lactate molecules and using them in aerobic metabolism. In terms of the bathtub model, this is most directly applicable to the idea of making a bigger drain. Or possibly making more drains in the bottom of the tub.

Increased VO2max

VO2max is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use, in an all hands on deck alert for a longer period of time (6 to 15 minutes). At VO2max your aerobic metabolism is at full tilt and your other organs are are taking up lactate to the maximum extent possible. Not only are the working muscles involved in burning the lactate but also your non-working organs are burning lactate as fuel to maximum extent possible. Your heart is pumping at its max capacity and your lungs are moving oxygen into your blood and CO2 out of your blood at peak rates. This ability, the maximum ability to burn oxygen for energy is very important for races in the four to eight minute range.

Anaerobic Adaptations

Increased Lactate Production

Increased lactate production ability means that speed of glycolysis gets faster after training it. In terms of our model you are getting a bigger firehose and can fill up the tub faster. Depending on the swimmer and the goal races this can be important. In races on the shorter end of the spectrum it is foreseeable that you could finish the race before having the opportunity to fill up your bathtub. So even if it is not used, you do want the ability to create a lot of lactate in a hurry.

Increased Lactate Tolerance

In terms of our model, increased lactate tolerance means a larger bathtub. The ability for your muscles to keep working even though the lactate and acid levels in the muscle cell are high. This encompasses a few different adaptations and as pointed out earlier, the exact mechanisms are not exactly certain. Obvious adaptations would be improved acid buffering capacity and also a reset of the "stop" signal in your nervous system.

Increased Speed

This adaptation exists largely outside of our model. This adaptation is about how fast you can move, irrespective of the lactate metabolism. So assuming lactate fatigue never kicked in, how fast could you go. This is a matter of nervous system function, contractile velocity, and even how fast your body can cycle ATP (the energy currency of your cells). While not clearly covered in the lactate metabolism discussion, I mention it here because one of the types of swim sets USA swimming uses is directed at this adaptation.

What Next?

The next question, What types of sets help make these adaptations will be in the next article.

Notes

3. Diseased hearts also undergo hypertrophy, that's why we say in healthy people cardiac hypertrophy is a good thing.

Lactate Metabolism

Lactate Metabolism and Maximum Lactate Steady State (MLSS) as it Affects Training Structure

Background

Different types of masters swim programs have different ways of doing things. Different types of sets target different sorts of adaptations, understanding the purpose of the sets will help you in following set design and making sure the workout you do is similar to the workout the coach had in mind. In other cases if you need to deviate from the coaches' plan you can do so intelligently.

In terms of physiology, much of what we do can be seen through the lens of lactate metabolism, so before starting the discussion of training sets, a bit about lactate metabolism and maximum lactate steady state.

MLSS

As will be seen later, some types of workouts are meant to create aerobic adaptations, others are aimed at anaerobic adaptations. Before addressing aerobic and anaerobic Adaptations, a little bit to explain the difference. Aerobic (with oxygen) and Anaerobic (without oxygen) are misnomers to a degree. Your body always uses oxygen for energy, it is simply that the system by which oxygen is used for energy is rate-limited. It can only be delivered so quickly. If your need for energy is outpacing the rate at which you can use oxygen for energy, then intermediate chemicals build up in your system. It’s like there is a logjam and all the logs are stacking up on the upstream side.

In energy metabolism, the first large substep is called glycolysis, it turns a glucose molecule in two lactate molecules¹ and creates energy in the process; this first step does not require oxygen. The glycolysis step can happen much faster than the next step in the chain. In normal, everyday situations, the lactate intermediary is then swept up and it goes to two separate subcycles that require oxygen and create MUCH more energy from that lactate molecule. It is these last two steps that are rate-limited.

This is where the logjam happens, if there is a signal to go all out, for example a starting gun, the glycolysis process can create lactate much more quickly than the aerobic metabolism can take it away and use it. I also like to use a bathtub analogy, in figure 1 lactate (water) is being delivered into the tub but is being swept away as quickly as it comes in and there is no net buildup of water in the tub (lactate). In this case the equilibrium is about halfway up the sides of the tub. The bathtub analogy goes even one step further, on your bathtub there is an overflow drain about halfway up the side of the tub. In the case of a muscle cell, something similar exists. In a working muscle cell, when the lactate concentration inside the cell gets too high, some of the lactate is taken out of the cell and enters the bloodstream. Once it enters the bloodstream, the lactate is taken to other organs to be used as fuel for aerobic metabolism in those organs. The lactate is used in other muscles that might not be working as hard, your liver, and actually is used as a fuel for your brain as well.

If instead of using a bathtub spigot to fill the tub, we use a firehose then the situation is a bit different. In this case there is no steady state, the firehose turns on and even though some of the water is being taken away through the drain, the water accumulates. If this situation persists, the bathtub will overflow, even taking into account the overflow drain in the tub halfway up, if the firehose is big enough it will overflow. In the muscle cells, instead of a firehose it is glycolysis that is running wide open and pouring lactate into the cell, even though the aerobic metabolism is dragging away some of the lactate, it is still accumulating in the cell.

As the lactate builds up too high, then bad things start to happen. Actually several different things and there is actually some debate about exactly how it works. For example, as part of all this when lactate is created, acid is created as well. It has been shown that when your muscles get too acidic, they do not want to fire, some coaches have claimed this is the “tying up” sensation that comes with high intensity exercise. There are others who say that you have acidity sensors and when they fire your brain will stop recruiting muscles; these are only two of many different ideas on exactly what is happening. Even though it is not exactly settled, what matters is that short term fatigue is closely associated with increased lactate levels at exercise, even if the exact mechanism how is not certain.

And what is “Maximum Lactate Steady State (MLSS)?” MLSS is the highest effort level that can be performed without the bathtub overflowing. It is just at the point where the tub is completely full and the water going down the drain and out the side drain is exactly equaled by the water coming in through the firehose. Think about your bathtub and how quickly water flows out of the drain when there is very little water in it, the water drains out pretty slowly. However when the tub is full, the amount of water flowing out per second is higher. If you leave the drain open and turn on the water just a bit, the tub will fill up just a bit until the water draining out equals the water coming in. Turn it on just a bit more and the water will build up higher still to make the water coming in and draining out equal.

You can continue doing this until you reach the point where having the tub filled to brim makes the water flowing in and flowing out equal. In cellular terms, this is the MLSS. This is the usual breakpoint between aerobic and anaerobic exercise. Exercise that is done where you stay under the MLSS effort is usually termed aerobic and exercise performed at an effort higher than MLSS effort is termed anaerobic.

In practical terms MLSS is something close to the pace you can maintain for a 30 minute max effort.

And what about Lactate Threshold?

In the vast majority of cases, when a coach says “Lactate Threshold” he really means MLSS. When a scientist says “Lactate Threshold” he means the effort at which your blood lactate is 1 mmol/L higher than resting level. So for most times you hear “Lactate Threshold” in popular literature or discussions² think MLSS.

So what?

The next question is “What can be done about it? Can I change the size of my tub? Can I make a bigger drain?” That will be covered in the next article.

1. Actually pyruvate is the intermediate chemical, however it is quickly converted back and forth from lactate to pyruvate depending on if there is oxygen to take the pyruvate away. No oxygen, then it gets converted to lactate until a later time when it can be converted back to pyruvate and taken away by the aerobic metabolism. 

2. Everyone talks about lactate metabolism in normal discussions right?

Discussion of Catch-up and Stick Drill

The catch-up drill and the stick drill, why to do them

And why you might want to avoid them.

The catch up drill and also the stick drill are often recommended for swimmers for a number of reasons. The first thing to note about them is that they are very simple to get the hang of. When your hands touch out front then you pull, that’s all there is to it. Another version of the drill is the stick drill where you hold a stick out in front of you and switch it between hands out front as you switch from pulling with one hand and then another.

The drills take almost no time for a coach to describe and also very little time for the swimmer to learn at a basic level. So they are recommended often. So what’s the problem; happy coach, happy swimmer,everybody wins. However, while the drills induce some good changes in most folks’ swimming, they can also induce a healthy number of bad changes in your stroke.

Why do these drills?¹

The most obvious reason why you might want to do these drills is to add more catch up to your stroke, ergo the name. The idea is that you always want to have at least one hand out in front of you as you swim. You would do this to cut down on your form drag. For example when I have my hand stretched out above my head, I am 8 feet from fingertip to floor. But when my hands are down I am 6’5” from head to toe. So the length of my body (which you can think of as a boat) increases or decreases by 18 inches on different parts of my stroke. On the other hand if I always keep one hand out in front I stay 8 feet long all the time. If you take two boats of equal weight and power one 8 feet long and the other 6.5 feet long, the 8 foot long boat will slip through the water more easily and be faster. That’s the reason most often given for why you would want to do these drills. And that’s all fine and dandy but the big question is how much do you lose when no power is being applied. If one hand is out front and the other hand is recovering, then there is no power being applied to the water and you are slowing down. So do you gain enough speed by having a longer line than you lose by having the delay in your strokes? That’s the question of the decade. I’ve never seen anything more than a thought experiment on why we might pursue one style or another, there have been no studies to my knowledge on what might happen if we change swimmers from one style to another by using the catch up or stick drill. So like many other things all we have to go on is a coaches intuition. My impression is that it CAN be beneficial but that it depends on the swimmer. You can certainly overdo this type of thing and make yourself slower by doing it.

If there’s so much “maybe” in this whole thing why do I recommend people do the drill?

While I think that the front quadrant timing may be beneficial the main reason I have people use the drill is if they routinely lift their heads to breathe, a common issue among the relatively inexperienced swimmers I work with in my triathlon swim classes. Lifting your head to breathe is not really bad in and of itself. But rather it is the things we need to do with our hands in order to lift our heads that are bad. In general you want to push water backwards, that’s what moves you forward through the water. However to lift your head you need to push water downward in one way or another. That’s the only way to get the upward force necessary to lift your head.

In order to get the force necessary to lift your head and breathe, people need to push water down toward the bottom of the pool. Pushing the water down tends to push your hands back up, you can then transmit this upward force to your head and lift it. Moving the water to the bottom isn't free, you will pay the price in one form or another for doing it. So eliminating it is a good idea.

Stage 1 Head Lifters!

The first way people lift their head is to push down with their outstretched arm as they breathe. This is demonstrated in the picture to the left.

I call this a stage 1 head lifter and is the key thing that I think the catch up drill works on. In fact everyone does this, only that the better swimmers do this so little that you really can’t see it when you watch. Poor swimmers might do this as much as the guy on the right. (His name is Paul BTW.) The most obvious way this slows you down is that it is wasted energy, why burn the energy required to push the water down when it i better used to move yourself down the lane.

But there is an other much more direct detrimental factor facing stage 1 head lifters; as your hand pushes downward it also rotates backward. The end result is that you lose the first part of your stroke. You may have started with the ability to pull for 4 feet, but if you push down to lift your head, you only have 2 feet left to pull.

You can see a fine example of this in the embedded video below.

The swimmer in the video pushes down sharply with her left hand as she breathes and as a result she gets her hand into a position to move water backwards very late in the stroke, she has lost the front half of her stroke and gets no propulsion from it. This is opposed to her right hand which gets into position to pull water backward while it is still in front of her head.

What the stick drill or catch-up drills do is that they MAKE you keep your outstretched arm out front, rather than pushing own toward the bottom. If you don’t leave it there then you won’t be able to catch up with it. Or in the case of the stick drill, you won’t be able to switch hands with the stick. You can see the same swimmer after an hour of practice below.

That’s great, problem: lifting head to breathe, solution: stick drill. Let’s all go home and rest.

It’s not exactly that easy, the example given was one hour one on one with a coach at her side helping to correct the other little things that pop up as she progressed. Without as much feedback, you might introduce some bad habits into your stroke.

Stage 2 Head Lifters

So you get hip to this, you read an article on the internet or in a magazine and decide to do some stick drill, no more pressing down for me. You get on it and start swimming catch up drill and all is good right? Well you might have made some steps forward but you may have taken a step back in another area. The first thing that doing catch-up drill and stick drill might make you start to do is become a stage 2 head lifter. A stage 2 head lifter doesn’t push his hands down anymore, but he still pushes water downward just in a different way. What a stage 2 head lifter does is that he angles his outstretched hand up. The angle of his hand means that as water hits his hand it is redirected down toward the bottom of the pool. If you do this, you will get a full pull, you won’t be cutting it short. However, you don’t get to push the water down to the bottom of the pool for free; you pay a price in terms of resistance. If your hand is angled up you are putting the brakes on. I call it the “STOP, in the name of love!” due to it’s similarity to The Supremes’ stage show. So while you have made a step forward you still are leaving a lot to be desired.

Here is a video of someone who has worked on his swim for quite a while but still has the STOP motion going. Look at his left hand as he breathes, in this case the camera is about 2 inches below the water’s surface and we can still see the palm of his left hand as he breathes. Also notice he doesn’t really drop his hand very much to hold his head up, he is past stage 1 and is now a stage 2 head lifter.

What to do about it?

Two things you need to do to avoid going down this path.

Hold on Tight

The first thing you need to do if you are doing the stick drill is that you need to grab the stick deep into your hand just as you would grab a relay baton in a track race. I sometimes see people who are using the stick for a drill but they use only their thumb to hold the stick and they extend their fingers out in front of the stick as they stroke. This is just a short trip away from the STOP! in the name of love that we see in the pictures above. So hold the stick securely and make sure you grab it with your fingers and thumb wrapped around the stick.

Keep Your Arm Low

The second thing you need to do is to make sure that your arm is angled down from your shoulder a bit as you swim. Realize that as you swim your arm originates from your shoulder socket. Since you are rotated onto your side a bit then your shoulder socket will be several inches below the water’s surface as you swim. Even if you were to put your arm straight forward from there your hand would have to also be several inches below the surface. I actually recommend erring on the lower side with your arm and hand angled slightly down from your shoulder. The sketch shows the desired position.

You can see in the embedded video that our friend from above who I used to show what the “STOP! in the name of love” is has eliminated the issue. The wonder of video makes it look like he made the change in an instant. These videos were taken one month apart. In between the swimmer did workouts specially designed to correct the "STOP! in the name of love" roughly three times per week.

What this means to us when we do stick drill or catch-up drill is that we need to make sure our hands are angled down as we do these drills. Start at around 16 inches below the surface and go from there. Like most things you can overdo that as well. You want to position your hand and arms so that there is a slight downward angle from your shoulder at full extension. Let’s say that slight in this case means 5 to 15° below horizontal.

Swimming Flat

Another thing that the catch up and stick drills can tend to do is to reinforce a flat swimming position. It is only natural that when you do these drills that you would tend to stop in the middle of your stroke, that is where you make the change from one hand forward to the other hand forward. But hanging around in a flat position puts both of your shoulders at the water's surface creating waves. Wave drag is bad, really bad. Fom drag and friction drag both increase with the square of your speed, double your speed and you will feel 4 times the drag. But wave drag rises with the cube of your speed, try to go twice as fast and you'll be facing EIGHT TIMES the amount of drag you were facing before. Triple your speed and your wave drag increases 27 times! So let's stay away from this wave drag.

When you linger in the flat position you extend the amount of time you have two shoulders at the surface each pushing a wave in front of it. In the slightly rotated position we are in when extended, only one shoulder is at the water's surface pushing water so less of a wave. We don't want to reinforce lingering in the flat position. On every stroke you will be flat for some period of time as you rotate from one side to the other, but you should only be passing through from one side to the other not spending extended time there.

The video below² shows a swimmer doing the stick drill and spending a lot of time in the flat position, notice that his belly button is pointing to the bottom of the before his recovering hand enters the water.

To avoid this when doing the catch-up or stick drill, what you'll need to do is make sure that when you reach forward with you recovering arm you do so while staying on your side. Don't rotate back too soon or you will end up staying flat for too long.

Now we have someone doing the catch-up drill who is wise to this fact and is doing a much better job of staying on his side while doing the drill. If you freeze the video at 5 seconds as his left hand enters the water you'll see his belly button clearly pointing about 45 degrees off to the side. Likewise if you freeze at 7 seconds you will see the same thing as his right hand enters the water.

How do we get there?

What you need to practice, in addition to having your hands about 16 inches below the surface when you do the drill, is to stay on your side until you make the transition of your hands. In the catch-up drill this means stay on your side until your recovering "catches up" to your hand out front. In the stick drill this means that you stay on your side until you have switched the stick into your other hand. A little thing I like to do is have people let the stick rotate with their body as they do the drill. So rather than keeping the stick flat and level, as you rotate let the stick rotate up onto one side a bit and then stay on your side as you grab it. Having the stick stay on it's side helps to remind you of how to do it.

How to use the drills

The first day that you try these drills I recommend stepping through each emphasis in turn with 200 - 300 of each emphasis. Maybe something like this: Set 1. 8 x 25 Stick Drill (:20 rest) [Just try to get the hang of it.]
Set 2. 8 x 25 Stick Drill (:15) [Concentrate on wrapping all your fingers and thumb around the stick.]
Set 3. 4 x 50 Stick Drill (:15) [Look forward at your hands³ as you swim and make sure that you have shoulders above your elbow - above your wrist - above your fingers.]
Set 4. 4 x 50 Stick Drill (:15) [Concentrate on staying on your side as your recover your arm, rotate the stick with you to help remind you]
Set 5. 4 x 50 Catch-Up Drill (:15) [In this drill pretend that the stick is still there and that you have to leave your hand out front until your recovering hand "catches up." Use the same emphasis as set 1.]
Set 6. 4 x 50 Catch-Up Drill (:15) [Use the same emphasis as set 3.]
Set 7. 4 x 50 Catch-Up Drill (:15) [Use the same emphasis as set 4.]
Set 8. 2 x 50 Modified Catch-Up Drill⁴ [On this drill you wait until your recovering hand touches the water, you don't have to wait until it catches up to the other hand. Use the same emphasis as set 1.]
Set 9. 2 x 50 Modified Catch-Up Drill [Use the same emphasis as set 3.]
Set 10. 2 x 50 Modified Catch-Up Drill [Use the same emphasis as set 4.]
Set 11. 6 x 25 (:20) [Swim while feeling what this new stroke is like.]
Once you have done that workout once or possibly twice, then you can add the catch up and stick drills as part of your warmup and then proceed with your normal workout. I like to do it this way: 6 x 50 Stick Drill (:10) [Do two of each of the above emphases]
2 x 50 catch-up drill (:10)
3 x 50 modified catch-up drill (:10)

Conclusion

Judging by the triathletes I coach one on one, the people I see in my video lesson sessions, and the people I see in my triathlon swim class, I thoroughly believe that a major portion of the middle of the pack triathletes and some front of the packer's as well will benefit from doing these drills for a while. If you administer them carefully and avoid the pitfalls I point out they can be a valuable thing. Unfortunately without care they can be detrimental to your stroke, so think about what you are doing. In most cases, I recommend sticking with a swim skill emphasis for 4 weeks. It seems to strike a reasonable balance between monotony and not wasting too much time learning new drills. Enjoy

¹ I don't want to give the impression that using these drills is universally accepted, like most swim drills there are people who will get in big arguments over whether to use them or not. For discussion on the topic from a coaches perspective, search the index of American Swimmer Magazine, two excellent articles have appeared there in the past two years.

² I don't know who "dalecannonman" is but I am grateful to him for putting his video up on the internet. I am not implying by using his video that his swimming or coaching is somehow not up to par. Coaches and swimmers work together to come up with plans for improvement based on many things including time allowed, coach knowledge, swimmers flexibility or proprioception, etc. I am not at all second guessing the work that "dalecannonman" has done on his swim and wish him the best.

³ No, I don't recommend that you look forward as you swim. But I do know that the additional feedback of seeing your hands helps you understand the proper hand position much more quickly than using your proprireception alone. You can do this for the first couple of weeks that you do the drill until you get the swing of it, then put your head back into a neutral position.

⁴ I often refer to the fact that modified catch-up drill is also called swimming. I recommend to triathletes that in just about all of their swimming they use this timing, that they wait until their recovering hand touches the water before they take their next stroke. However, that recommendation is speed dependent, the faster you go the less catch up you will show in your stroke and this is a good thing. My main concern is that the swimmer not use speed as an excuse to resume pushing their hand down to breathe. To that end MOST swimming that a triathlete does in training can be done with modified catch-up stroke timing or at least aspiring to that stroke timing during the set. The proper modification when doing a very fast swim set would be to have less catch-up but not start pushing your hand down to breathe either. In my experience it takes a well developed and experienced swimmer to do this, so using modified catch-up drill most of the time is a good idea for the typical middle of the pack age group triathlete.

Constant Effort

Why should you hold a nearly constant effort when riding or running up and down hills? It is almost axiomatic among coaches that when racing you need to hold a nearly constant effort for the entire race, up or down hills. And why is that? Is there a justification? Couldn't you simply rest on the downhills and it will all average out? Well it kinda averages out but not really, let's talk about fatigue for a moment. In triathlons there are two types of fatigue we routinely face, there are other fatigue processes but these are the ones we hit routinely.

1. Fatigue from lactate accumulation in the muscles. When needing energy quickly, your body breaks down glycogen without oxygen and produces lactate ions. The biochemistry of lactate ions is quite complex and the understanding of it gets better every year. But what we need to know is this, elevated lactate concentration is associated with a lack of contractility in muscle, during a race if your muscle fibers get higher lactate levels in them - those fibers won't want to fire for a while.
   
   Lactate as a cause of fatigue is actually controversial, but lactate as a marker of fatigue is not. Not only that, but once these fibers have decided they won't contract, they will stay that way for a "long time." You can consider them pretty much done for the course of the race. For reasons not entirely clear, those muscle cells will not fire again for a while. If you rest about half of those fibers will start firing again in 20ish minutes; but of course, you aren't resting - you are riding the rest of the race.
   
   One way to experience this is a gross pacing error, going out WAY too hard. Just really spanking it from the get go. It's almost silly to mention it but it does happen. Going out too fast on the swim is not entirely uncommon. Also hitting your favorite sport and trying to make up time. Say you're a strong cyclist and want to pick up some time on your competitors who swam faster than you. You can easily overdo it here. Same thing with running. The more common way to encounter this type of fatigue is in small bursts, over hills. You hit it too hard over one hill and you take a subset of muscle cells out of the action for the duration. On another hill another set of cells are down for the count, the next hill your body recruits another set of them and THEY go down for the count. Then you get to the last hill and everyone is down for the count! Your legs just won't go any faster!
   
2. The second type of fatigue we encounter regularly is glycogen depletion. The way this works is that your liver supplies its glycogen reserves to your bloodstream as glucose. Keeping your blood sugar up as your muscles get part of their energy supply from your blood (not all of it). Running up against this type of fatigue is much more common. It represents an error in pacing and also nutrition.

Back to the lactic acid fatigue. You might think well, I can go hard up the hill and go easy down the hill and everything will even out. Unfortunately as I mentioned earlier once your muscle cell pH gets low enough that your muscles don't want to fire any longer, it takes a long time for those muscles to be ready to fire again. Long enough that you can consider them done for the race. So every time you dig deep to get up a hill you are taking part of your muscle cells down. Depending on the length of the race, this is fine. In a 5k, possibly a sprint tri for the faster people, you might do this for tactical reasons or just to make sure you fully expend everything you have. But when the race starts getting up over 2.5 hours and even more so with longer races, it will take everything you have to keep the glycogen depletion fatigue at bay. So adding this type of fatigue to the mix is a REALLY bad idea. You already have enough problems to deal with with. Those of us here in the Baltimore area have another reason to practice the skill of keeping an even power distribution. It's that the big races, Iron and half iron races will be in territory that is flatter than what we usually ride on. Even if there are hills, the hills are longer than the 2 minutes up and 1 minute down hills we routinely ride on. I know everyone talks about how riding in the hills is hard but don't lid yourself. At all but one Ironman North America Race and at most of the half iron races in the mid atlantic, you hop on the bike, get in your aerobars, get your hr to race pace and stay there. For an iron distance you'll stay there for the next 6 hours, half iron around 3. Cycling in hills is hard but it's a different type of stress than the race situation. So to get good at it, you need to replicate race conditions as much as you can. By the same token, on the run you need a different type of strength to keep running at the same pace with the same muscles than you do in the hills. Lots of it actually mental, but that doesn't mean we don't need to practice it. So how to do it? It's pretty easy actually? Just back off on the hills. With a bike power meter it is easy as the feedback is immediate. If all you have is your hr you need to remember that your hr reflects what you were doing about 30 seconds before. So your power expenditure will have already gone up substantially by the time you start to breathe harder and you heart rate goes up on your monitor. The way to practice if you are using a heart rate monitor only is that when you hit the hill or slightly before you hit the hill you need to back down. As you start up the hill watch your hrm, it needs to stay within 2 to 3 bpm of wherever you were before you hit the hill. By the same token on thew first part of the downhill, until your legs spin out on the bike, you need to keep your effort up and keep your power right where you want it or keep your hr right where you want it. On the bike when you spin out the gears just tuck in and ride. For running you can do the same thing if running on a clear path of road, I don't recommend legging it out on downhills when running trails. The risk of an ankle sprain is too high when running fast downhill on trails. So get your intensity either in the form of hr or power under control and you'll have all your motor units ready to fire the length of your next race. Kevin