Tempo Trainer
Today's top coaches agree, maintaining a consistent pace and cadence is crucial to achieving success in competition.
And tempo trainer is the best tool available to help you lock into your optimum pace and cadence for any length of race.
The tempo trainer is a small electronic device that slips inside your cap just under the strap of your goggles.
It transmits an audible beat and you can adjust the frequency of the beat making it like a waterproof metronome.
What the tempo trainer does best is to give you feed-back.
It alerts you immediately if your pace, your stroke-rate, or your distance per stroke is breaking down, thus eliminating the lows from your work-out.
The audible prompt helps you maintain a consistent rhythm and flow which leads to a more symmetrical stroke.
And additional and surprise benefit is that the tempo trainer can carry you to a level of performance you might not otherwise achieve on your own.
By surrendering and locking into the steady beep of the tempo trainer you can often swim outside yourself,
and learn to maintain a stroke rate or pace that takes your swimming to a whole new level.
When you turn on the tempo trainer for the first time by pressing the right hand button, it will start beeping at a one second interval.
To make the tempo trainer beep at a faster rate, press the left hand button.
You can adjust the rate in hundreds of second.
To make it beep at a slower rate, press the right hand button.
To turn off the tempo trainer, press both buttons at the same time.
When you turn it back on, it will start beeping at your previous setting.
If you keep pressing the right hand button the tempo trainer will scroll up until it beeps every 9.99 seconds.
And then it will jump into mode 2.
In mode 2, the tempo trainer gives you a triple beep.
In mode 2, you can scroll up or down, in 1 second intervals, from 10 seconds up to 9 minutes and 59 seconds.
Mode 2 is used for monitoring and setting your pace for entire length for specific distance such as 50, 100, or 200.
To get started with your tempo trainer, hit the left hand button and take it back to mode 1,
and back to the original setting of 1.0, where it'll give you 1 beep every second.
Swim one length of this setting with a very moderate effort.
The idea is to keep each hand entry so that it coincides with the beep.
At the wall, adjust the frequency up or down until you find the setting that gives you a nice long stroke but a stroke that still gives you a sense of flow.
If you feel like you're over kicking, you need to increase the cadence until you feel like swimming and not drilling.
When you find the setting that lets you with a long relaxed stroke, you've found your maximum distance per stroke, or DPS. And it's time to experiment.
Try swimming 25 or 50 yards with your DPS setting.
For our swimmers, it's 1 second per stroke.
Then increase the cadence by 1/10 second.
Now our swimmer are at 0.9 second per stroke.
Increase the cadence by another 1/10 second.
They're at 8/10 or 0.8.
And increase the rate again by 1/10 second.
Our swimmers are now at a tempo trainer setting of 0.7 or 7/10 second per every arm stroke.
Their swimming has become much more intense, but they're still holding good form.
When your cadence become so fast that your technique falls apart, it's time to go back up the scale,
gradually taking the tempo trainer back to your starting point for a nice long stroke.
While the tempo trainer is an exceptional training tool for advanced swimmers,
one of its best uses is as a technique tool for less advanced swimmers or for triathletes who struggle to relax in the water.
This steady beep of the tempo trainer helps swimmers relax,
and gives them a focus point around which to build a technically solid stroke.
Here, this swimmer is matching the beep to full extension of the hand.
For breaststroke and butterfly, the tempo trainer is a superb tool for teaching full body undulation.
Put on some Z2 fins and set the tempo trainer to beep every 1.75 seconds.
The slow steady rhythm will encourage you to use your entire body to move forward.
By sticking to the beep, your movements will become more fluid and more productive.
For backstroke, the tempo trainer can help cure 2 common stroke flaws, over-reaching and a straight arm pull.
With the tempo trainer setting of fairly fast cadence, swimmers will have less time to complete the pull cycle.
The result is a less over-reaching, a quicker catch, and a more shallow bent arm pull.
Mode 2 of the tempo trainer is great for developing a sense of pace for races of every distance.
A sample sprint set will be to swim 4 25s with the tempo trainer set at your pace for your 50 free.
This swimmer wants to go sub 26 seconds for the 50 free.
So she goes in the mode 2 of the tempo trainer, and sets it to beep every 13 seconds.
At the beep, she pushes off and tries to defeat the tempo trainer to the wall.
This set improves reaction time and imprints an exact sense of pace.
This video has shown only a few of the many ways that the tempo trainer can be used to improve your training.
For more ideas on how to use this small but powerful tool, check out the finisinc.com website and the goswim.tv website,
where you will find drills and sets that use the Finis tempo trainer and other Finis products.
But the best way to benefit from the tempo trainer is to use it.
Let your imagination run free. Set challenging goals and don't be afraid to experiment.