Please Read this before looking for your results!!!!

 

Monday 28th Jan we changed things up with a swim testing night at the club session. Rather than traditional TT (coming also in the future) we did a CSS test that requires a 400m TT then 200m TT. We then apply a formula to these results to calculate a CSS (Critical Swim Speed) that equates to what you’d swim for a 1500m TT which equates nicely to “threshold” values. It’s possibly fractionally better than say a straight 750TT as it considers drop off between shorter and longer 200+400. So it’s helpful if you are a v anaerobic athlete or v aerobic athlete. It does require decent pacing of the TT – so if you swam 8:00 for 400m (30 secs per length) but your first 50 took 40 secs (20 secs per length) then the results might not mean much.

 

A big thank you to everyone in attendance for your attention, effort and for helping out with timing etc. It was lovely to see the commitment.

 

Like anything though the results have to be interpreted – we do testing randomly at the club so that we are more likely to get people in normal training status and so have numbers that are readily applicable in the real world. So there will be some individuals who were smashed from other training who got worse than expected results, some may have been fresh. It’s just how it goes. None of this is a pass or fail assessment, there’s a level of variation in performance also regardless of fatigue. I have all the swim data with pacing splits calculated – I can run you through them briefly after a club session or you could book a swim performance review with 1-2-1 coaching time contact me if you are interested. I’m also running a 1 day swim workshop with video analysis of your swim, technical workshop, land training, pace testing and some post course training sessions soon – again give me a shout if interested or keep an eye out at www.proendurancecoaching.co.uk 

 

The CSS score is particularly useful away from the club as many of our swimmers do little other swimming and the v busy nature of the club makes it hard to do longer reps which is where the CSS pace guidance is particularly useful. How about trying these 4 main set sessions to work on your sustainable speed and pace judgement:

 

 

Happy swimming!!!