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Schwimm-Ratgeber

Tapern II

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Kategorie: Training
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By Richard A. Michaels, Coach Oberlin College (Ohio)

(Reproduced from "The Fast Lane", the Official Newsletter of Queensland Swimming Association Inc.)

In introducing an article or discussion on tapering, it is wise to lead with an acknowledgment that the tapering phase of the swimmer’s competitive program is not only the most crucial - it is also the most worrying. To this time, tapering continues as an art rather than a science - with much still to be learnt.

Given that there are exceptions to every rule, tapering is largely a matter of assessing individual requirements based on the coach’s long-term observation of individual swimmers. The decision as to what work to do during the tapering period is a matter of consultation between coach and swimmer.

It is an individual consideration.

The author of this paper is one of a very few who have set out a program. It is to be accepted only as a basis for discussion/consideration.

Swimming is a strange sport. The athletes train an entire season for that one day they will put everything on the line in a single, great effort.

As coaches, we know that the swimmers trust us to tell them exactly how much rest they will need to produce the big performance. It’s a burden - but not a thankless one. We all know what a thrill it is to see our swimmer hit the taper just right - turn in a time that he had previously only dreamed of.

Knowing how much rest to give a swimmer isn’t anything you can pick up in an article or a book. It is both a skill and an intuition. Most of us have the skill, but our intuition can sometimes fail us … and our kids won’t have the kind of Meet we hoped for.

Perhaps I can be of some help on this score. You may be able to pick an idea from several of the experiences I’ve had over the past few years - experiences that changed my ideas about tapering and a second taper, after 14 years of relatively successful Championship Meets.

First … the taper itself. We refer to that period of time after a season of hard training in which we are trying to prepare our swimmers for something close to maximal performance. Such performances require rest, and the taper is nothing more than the rest period in which we ‘taper off’ the workload and try to get our swimmers ready to perform well.

The trick lies in not resting them too much or too little. I now believe that most of us have been under-resting our swimmers. Looking back over my 14 years of college coaching, I cannot recall a single swimmer whom I have over-rested.

All coaches are fearful of letting a swimmer get out of shape by resting him too much. But the real problem is that we really don’t know how much is too much.

I recall a swimmer who, in early January, hit the NCAA qualifying time for the Div.III 100-yard breaststroke. At the time, the cut-off was 1:01.1. His coach, in a stroke of genius, had him rest just enough to go 1:01.1 - exactly what we have in mind when we try to hit mid-year cuts. By qualifying by only one-tenth of a second, the swimmer missed a minimum of training, yet still accomplished his goal of hitting the NCAA cut time.

At the NCAA Meet in mid-March, the swimmer split 56.5 on his leg of the medley relay and swam a 2:08+ in the 200 breaststroke - a personal best by something like four seconds.

When I asked the coach what kind of taper the boy did, I was amazed to learn that the boy had been on a taper since January, when he swam his 1:01.1!

An eight-week taper? This concept was alien to my way of thinking, and I confess that I thought the coach was exaggerating. He wasn’t. He simply thought that the swimmer had been pretty tired in January when he qualified and that he needed some rest to collect himself before resuming hard work.

A similar situation happened to me. My best swimmer, who had twice been an NCAA qualifier in the 400 IM, was having a great dual-meet season, turning in best-ever practice times with some personal bests for non-tapered events. I put him on the same taper that he had done his first two years - and he want on to have a very poor Championship Meet.

I said to myself, "What is going on here?" This swimmer had gone 4:16.5 in the 400 IM at the previous Championships and only went 4:21.5 this year. This mediocre time could not be laid to reduced intensity. I knew the boy well enough to know this was not the case.

My conclusion was that he was simply more tired this year, and needed more rest than I had given him. Operating on that theory, I put him on another three-week rest for the NCAA meet, giving a total of six weeks of taper. He responded with a lifetime best of 4:15.8. In my view, this was another reinforcement for the theory that it is easy to under-rest a swimmer, but very difficult to over-rest him.

How hard to taper is directly proportional to how tired your swimmer is. In our situation, we begin training in early October and swim relatively hard through to the end of January, with very little rest. The success of our year is based solely on how well we do at our Conference Championships at the end of February.

Dual Meets are of only minor importance to us, since they do not count in the final standings. Consequently, we take little rest, except for a few Meets with our closest rivals or whenever the swimmers get so tired they are unable to practice well.

I believe you can do more harm than good by ‘pounding’ your kids when they start failing. When February rolls around, you can have some pretty ‘blown-out’ swimmers who need a good rest to perform well.

Coaches have to use their intuition about the team’s condition and must gear their taper accordingly. I believe that a very tired swimmer may require up to eight weeks of rest to recover from an intensive season of training.

SECOND TAPER

Now, what do you do for a second taper? The swimmer has gone through a tough season and required a hard taper (long rest) to hit his NCAA qualifying time or make it out of the District Meet and into the State Championships.

With two or three weeks between our Conference Championships and Nationals, I used to go back to two-day workouts and attempt to ‘break them down’ again. I achieved poor results with this method, but I attributed our poor NCAA showing to the fact that my swimmers peaked psychologically at the Conference Meet and were less motivated at the Nationals because of the impersonal nature of the Meet.

That is, they didn’t know many of the swimmers, and thus simply couldn’t get involved as much. As important as the Nationals were to me, I had to admit that it was very difficult to regain a fever pitch in practice on the Monday after the Conference Championships. The air just goes out of you after a very intensive weekend.

After repeated mediocre performances with the "break-them-down-again’ method, I decided to attempt a different approach. Instead of going back to hard training after the Conference Meet, I set out to maintain what we had achieved over the course of the season without over-stressing the swimmers.

THEORY

With only a short time between big meets, you do not have the time to gain more conditioning and then take the rest you would need to recover. Physiologists tell us that we need to achieve heart rates of only 140-150 beats per minutes (bpm) to maintain conditioning. When we go far beyond this range, we begin to break our swimmers down again.

Since our only goal was to provide maintenance workouts for our NCAA qualifiers, I would not permit them to go faster and work harder … they found this approach very strange, indeed.

Once we had explained the physiological principles behind our request to swim slower in practice, we had little trouble achieving our goal - although we usually had to keep asking the swimmers to back off a little.

After a hard taper, swimmers can achieve remarkable practice times, but unless you want them to break down again - and you don’t - you must keep them controlled.

My qualifiers that year were swimming events from 100 through 400 yards. We kept the practice yardage moderate at 4-5,000 yards a day in only an afternoon workout. Three times a week we divided the group into middle distance and distance - with appropriate sets for each. The bulk of the workouts consisted of short rest sets - i.e. a set of 10x150 x 2:15 at 80% effort - which allowed 15-20 seconds rests.

Pulse rates were taken after each repeat - a trick in itself on short rest sets. We took the pulse for 6 seconds, and then added a zero. That is, if the pulse rate was 15 after 6 seconds, we figured that the swimmer’s pulse rate was about 150bpm, and within the range we wanted him to maintain.

One of my concerns about doing only maintenance cardiovascular work was that our strength might decrease from using only 80% effort swims. So I put the swimmers back on the weights four or five sessions, lifting every other day.

Like the cardiovascular work, the lifting was reduced both in quantity and quality to the 80% level. Swim paddles were also used to create additional strength work, again at submaximal efforts.

The following is a sample workout used during the second taper period…

  1. 1000 warmup / your choice S, K, P.
  2. 24x50: 8 on :50 alternate strokes / no freestyle, 8 on :45 alternate freestyle and stroke, and 8 on :40 freestyle, 80% effort.
  3. 5x200 x 3:00 swim with paddles; even #25’s 90% effort.
  4. 10x50 x :50 negative split (second 25, 90% effort)
  5. 5 x 50 descending x 3.00 from dive.
  6. 500 swim down

Total: 4,450

As you can see, very little of the workout was above the 80-90% effort level. The only element approaching a maximal effort was the final set of 50’s and even those times were descending, with only the last repeat (in theory) all out.

The final point about this type of taper may be the most important … it greatly increases the psychological readiness of your swimmers to come back and swim fast. By not permitting your athletes to swim fast in workout - except for an occasional burst on a 25, 50 or perhaps a 75 - you can have them literally champing at the bit to explode in a race!

Another favourable psychological element … these workouts are greater confidence-builders than the conventional second tapers that break the swimmers down again.

For one thing, your swimmers will have trouble going as slow as you ask them to go. That point feels strange to a swimmer, but it is a refreshing feeling.

Secondly, when you do permit them to swim fast on a descending set from a dive, their times will be fast, perhaps faster than they have ever done in workout. This will pump them up even further and give them confidence in your approach.

(I am also not above telling a little white lie on the last 50 of a descending set - telling my breaststroker that his time was 28.05 instead of 28.15 it was, to give him a little more confidence.)

Again, knowing how little or how much rest to prescribe during taper is mostly intuitive, given the wide range of personalities you must deal with. Forgive my English, but "Each swimmer is a different degree of tired", and each swimmer will react a little differently to the same taper.

All you can do is keep good records of each swimmer’s performances during the taper period and react accordingly in the future.

Whenever you have an abnormal number of disappointing championship performances, you can figure that the athletes who turned them in were probably in need of more rest, and you can begin thinking of the maintenance taper.

I believe it will work for you and that it may get you to change your convictions about training and stress in general. Perhaps you have gone a little overboard on practice intensity.

 

SOME ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON TAPERING

By Cecil Colwin

  1. There is no precise rule to be applied to tapering.
  2. Swimmers taper for specific events and need close individual attention when tapering.
  3. An important principle is that quantity of training is decreased and quality and rest are increased.
  4. Young swimmers should taper late because they tend to lose the ‘feel’ of their strokes quickly.
  5. Sprinters need a longer taper than the distance swimmers.

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