(upbeat music)
- Welcome back to the triathlon training explained show
powered by TrainingPeaks.
And this week, we're back in the pool at Team Bath,
to tackle a question we hear time and time again,
what is threshold swimming
and what is your threshold pace?
See, if you want to increase your race pace in the swim,
then it's essential that you improve your lactate threshold.
This is basically the point at which
you start to accumulate lactate in your bloodstream
at a quicker rate than can be removed.
So, basically slowing you down.
So, by knowing the pace of your lactate threshold,
you can start tailoring your sessions
to basically bump that pace up.
It sounds complicated, it sounds scary,
but it really isn't.
So today, I'm gonna be explaining it for you.
(upbeat music)
Okay, so when we're trying to improve our swimming,
we tend to do a couple of things.
We jump in the swimming pool
and we swim up and down steadily and aerobically
to improve out fitness.
The other thing we do is we try to improve our technique.
So, by improving our technique,
we can be more efficient through the water.
Both of those are great, they're fantastic,
and you should continue to do those.
But have you thought about doing specific sessions
designed to improve your threshold swim pace?
Now, if you are new to swimming,
then threshold sessions may not be for you right now,
but if you have been swimming for some time
and you swim quite regularly,
then they could really help you.
So, let me run you through a threshold session.
(upbeat music)
Okay, so I used to a do a
relatively straight forward session
I'm gonna run you through here.
It's part of my Threlfall's turbo
threshold triathlon training.
Also known as T-T-T-T-T.
And the main step for that is 20 100s
and I used to do this off about a 1:20 turnaround
give or take,
and so you're going for relatively short turnarounds.
Something around 7 to 12 seconds
and yeah, it does start to bite after awhile.
The common mistake I would see on a session like this,
is athletes going far too hard from the start.
So, they actually end up failing
and not making the turnaround later on in the session.
The other thing I'd see is athletes taking
far too easy of a turnaround,
so actually getting a lot of rest
and it means that yeah, they can swim at a faster pace
above their threshold.
The problem here is you're not swimming at a threshold pace,
you're actually swimming at an anaerobic pace,
which is handy to a degree for triathlon
and open water swimming,
but given the length of the swims,
it isn't quite as relevant.
So, I think I made it pretty clear by now,
you need to know your threshold pace.
So for this, I'm gonna jump in the pool.
Okay, so threshold generally refers to the best pace
or effort we can sustain for 60 minutes.
But firstly, who really fancies doing a 60 minute time trial
to find out that pace?
Certainly not me
and also, we're not all swimming for 60 minutes
in a triathlon,
so that's where critical swim speed or CSS comes in.
So, this works out our best pace we can maintain
for 1500 meters and also works as a good
close approximation of our lactate threshold pace.
And in my experience, it's pretty bang on.
In fact, Paul Newsome of Swim Smooth, created CSS
and it's now used by countless pros and national teams.
So for this, you need to do a 400 meter time trial,
take a short break,
and then do a 200 meter time trial.
Which sounds a heck of a lot better
than doing a 60 minute time trial if you ask me,
so, you need to arrive feeling rested and ready
to perform this test as best as possible
and really nail it so the results are valid and useful
for your training.
You want to both of the tests from a push start
and do the 400 meter before the 200,
as it less likely to affect the 200
than the other way around
and make sure you take a really good recovery
between both the reps with a little bit of easy swimming.
Right, out I get.
- [Man] Whoa, where you going mate?
- Oh, have I got to do it? - Ya.
- Okay, so first rep, 400 meters, here I go.
(upbeat music)
'Kay, next one, 200 meter time trial,
here we go.
(upbeat music)
(water splashing)
Oh my god.
Right, that's both time trials done.
So, for the 400, I went 4:36.
And for the 200, I went 2:12.
So, now I just need to work out my threshold
and CSS pace.
For that, I'm gonna head back to the GTN set
and get changed.
Right, now that we've done the test,
it's time to work out our critical swim speed
and for that, we need to put our times
through a little calculation
and I'm gonna try and do my best to explain this now.
So, our CSS calculation is here.
So, we've got on this side, our distances,
and this side, our times.
So, we're gonna subtract 200 from 400,
giving us 200 obviously.
And then on this side,
we're gonna convert our times to seconds.
So, we're gonna subtract our 200 meter time
from our 400 meter time and divide the two.
I'm gonna use my own as an example here.
So, on this side,
I converted my swim splits to seconds.
So, I've got 261.6
and I'm gonna subtract 127.2 into that
and divide 200 by that value.
And that gives me a value of 1.49
and that is in meters per second
and what that means
is I'm traveling a one meter and 49 centimeters per second.
That's cool, but still not very useful at this point,
so we need to convert that a little bit further.
So, I've done that here.
That gives me a time of 1:12 per 100 meters
and that is my CSS,
my critical swim speed pace.
So, that's really cool.
I enjoyed doing the math there,
but I do understand that's a bit complicated.
So, you can of course just go online.
You can go onto the Swim Smooth website
and use their online calculator,
but where's the fun in that?
I enjoyed that anyway.
It is worth nothing that these calculators
do throw out some interesting numbers sometimes
which do throw people.
So, let me run you through a couple of those scenarios.
Alright for this, we're gonna use this graph here.
So, we've got speed up the side
and distance along the bottom.
So, let's bring in swimmer number one.
They're a bit of a speed demon,
you can that over 50 meters,
they're practically of the chart in terms of speed.
200 meters, also very good.
Then we start to see a considerable drop off
going into the 400 and so on.
Now, let's bring in swimmer number two.
Not as fast as the speed demon over the shorter distances,
over the 50, the 200,
but then the 400, interestingly,
they have very similar 400 meter time to swim
and number one, what we see there,
is that from 400 onwards,
they're possibly better over the longer distances.
Which, I mean, does throw people.
You probably, having swum with swimmer number one,
you would have said that they are the better swimmer,
they're gonna win in a race.
So, this can naturally cause a bit of stir
in your club sessions.
In fact, let's make this a little more relatable.
And Alister Brownlee did a really good explanation
of this in the past.
So, using this graph here,
we've got speed up the side,
and then we got athlete A, athlete B, and then athlete C.
Athlete A, as you can see,
has got an incredible max speed,
they are the speed demon.
Athlete B, not so much, quite a big drop off,
they don't have a good max speed.
Athlete C, they sit somewhere in the middle,
still a respectable max speed.
So, by going by this graph right now,
if you put these guys into a race,
you'll probably think athlete A is gonna come out on top.
But what this graph doesn't take into account
is their threshold pace.
What they can sustain for something like 1500 meters.
So, let's take a look at
athlete A and athlete B to start off with.
Athlete A being a sprinter,
we typically see with swimmers like this,
they have considerable drop off in their threshold pace.
So, there's quite a big gap
between their max speed, their threshold pace.
Athlete B, because they don't have such a high max speed,
there is very little difference between their threshold pace
and their max speed.
And interestingly, possibly quite similar to athlete A's.
So, you put them in a 400 meter time trial,
might come out with a very similar time,
as we saw on the graph before.
Then we have athlete C,
which is what the Brownlee's consider themselves being.
They have a good max speed,
not as good as athlete A's,
but still very respectable and very useful
for those ITU mass start surges
and just generally the high pace those Brownlee's swim.
But this is where it gets interesting.
Because they have a threshold pace
so close to their max speed
and actually so much higher
that anything over something like four to five minutes,
these guys are gonna come flying through.
So, this is really interesting.
This is basically what we're striving for
by doing these threshold swims.
We're trying to bump up that threshold pace
and our max speed, of course.
Clearly works for the Brownlee's,
let's give it a go.
So, now you have your threshold or CSS pace,
what do you do with it?
Well, if you have a Training Peaks account,
you can now input that new threshold pace into your account
and it will calculate your training zones for swimming.
So, what this means is
when you upload a swim session,
where you're finished,
it will actually calculate the intensity of that swim
and give you a stress score.
In terms of the sessions that you do
to improve your threshold,
well the possibilities are endless and progressable.
So, I'm gonna use a few examples here.
So, my 20 100 session earlier,
with a relatively short recovery.
Something like 7 to 15 seconds.
And then you progress that to something like 10 200s,
with a 20 second recovery.
So, slightly longer.
And then progress again to something like five 400s
with a 30 second recovery
and then again, progress it to something like three 600s
with a longer 40 to 45 second recovery.
Now, obviously, you can shorten all those reps,
if you're not quite ready for two kilometer main set.
And of course, don't forget to do a
good warm up and warm down for this.
Now at this point, if your training is going well
and you're managing to complete
a threshold session each week or quite regularly,
then you might start to see your threshold time dropping
and improving, which is great,
that is what it's all about.
So, it might be time to retest
and I normally suggest doing that
every four to eight weeks,
but I do understand that will mean sacrificing a session
to do that, which you may not be happy with doing.
So, if you're confident you've improved your CSS time
buy one to two seconds,
just adjust your CSS time accordingly,
and if you struggle with it,
just revert back to your original.
But I would suggest not adjusting it by too much at once
without retesting to confirm and validate that.
Now, I have covered a lot today on threshold swimming
and to be honest, I could keep going all day.
So, if you do have any questions,
please drop them in the comment section below
and I'll try and answer those.
It is worth noting that I'm not suggesting
cutting sprints and anaerobic swimming completely
from your training program.
They're still very beneficial in terms of
applying power through the water
and improving your max speed.
All I'm suggesting is perhaps adjusting
the way that you train,
maybe shifting some of your anerobic main sets
to more CSS threshold swimming.
So, you're dropping the pace
and reducing that recovery.
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