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Exercise physiology has always been a big interest of mine. I've always interested in the relationships between systems of the human body and the demands of sport, like how much rest you might need to sustain a certain pace, for a given time, for a target volume, and these weren't always answers that were readily available. So I had to go out into the woods and look for my own answers, and I've found that I learned so much more along the way.

 

In my opinion, if you're a serious swim coach, you need to be cracking open some Exercise Phys books. You would be well-served by looking at pieces from a variety of swimming and non-swimming sources (recognizing that not everything will be transferable), and taking the most away from the people that are most expert (rather than those who are the loudest).

 

So who are some of the big dogs, or people to listen to? A lot of them actually come from the same source: the German Sport University Cologne, home to scholars like Dr. Jan Oblrecht and Dr. Alois Mader.

 

Olbrecht wrote a book called "The Science of Winning: Planning, Periodizing, and Optimizing Swim Training", which is generally considered to be one of the best books on how human physiology responds to the act of swimming both in the short and long-term. Bob Bowman once jokingly said that he read it about 5 times, and was finally starting to understand it. So it's very in-depth, but also very interesting, and "closer to the metal" (a computer science term), meaning it's closer to what really happens, rather than what we like to think happens. Jan has a PhD in both physiology and biomechanics, so has a very good understanding of how performance is produced.

 

Dr. Alois Mader (another big dog) was Olbrecht's mentor. His claim to fame was developing this Mader model of how energy metabolism works in muscles. I might sound like Patrick Bateman hyping up Huey Lewis and the News, but his seminal work, "Glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation as a function of cytosolic phosphorylation state and power output of the muscle cell", was pretty sweet. I also wouldn't recommend reading it unless you're crazy, because it uses exciting but esoteric terms like "CHEP-sytem" and "5th-order Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg-routine". Believe it or not, I actually did take a class on that last one in my CompSci undergrad.

 

In English, Mader's model allowed you to ask and answer questions like:

• How would my performance across different events change if I increased my aerobic abilities? What about anaerobic?
  • If I improve my aerobic capacity, what happens to my 400 time?
  • If I improve my anaerobic capacity, what happens to my 50?
• How long can I swim at a given intensity before blowing up, and what will be the cause of my death?
  • How long can I swim at 30 seconds per 50, with ideal technique?
  • Will my limiting factor be a lack of energy/power, or a lactic acid lock-up, or something else?
• How can I define the zones that I want to target my training towards, to get optimal improvement for myself?
  • What is a lactate threshold, and do I train under, at, or above it?
  • What is VO2Max, what is VLaMax, why does everything have V in front of it, mom pick me up, I'm scared.

 

In my opinion, the best "English" overview of the progression of research in this area is "Lactate Thresholds and the Simulation of Human Energy Metabolism: Contributions by the Cologne Sports Medicine Group in the 1970s and 1980s" by Wackerhage et al.

 

Link: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2022.899670/full

 

Basically, they highlight that the Cologne Sports Medicine Group was responsible for the following ideas:

 

Aerobic and Anaerobic Capacities

• We can measure something called "Lactate" in blood that is always present, but produced even more during intensive exercise
  • You may have been exposed to this as "Lactic Acid" accumulation - these models do talk about muscle acidity too.
• You both produce and consume lactate in proportions depending on your unique capacities and the exercise intensity
  • Relevant but not original: VO2Max represents the greatest rate of volume of oxygen your body can use in exercise
  • VLaMax represents the fastest rate that your body can break down carbs glycolytically to produce energy quickly
• You are constantly resynthesizing energy from a variety of sources, determined by intensity and your personal capacities

 

Dynamics of the Lactate Threshold

• Your blood lactate reading at your lactate threshold is generally in the neighbourhood of 4.0 mmol/L
  • Your individual threshold is not necessarily 4.0M, but dependent on your lactate production & removal
• What's most important is that it's your "maximal lactate steady state" (MaxLass), that can be sustained for a long period of time
  • If you're working above your threshold, at some point you are going to keel over and succumb to harsh fatigue
  • There's something called the VO2Slow component that gradually pulls you to VO2Max, especially above threshold

 

There were also some implications for how you could change your threshold, which has performance implications:

• Improving your maximal aerobic utilization (VO2Max) causes your threshold to improve by removing more lactate
• Decreasing your maximal rate of glycolysis (VLaMax) causes your threshold to improve by producing less lactate

 

A bunch of coaches only saw this last piece, that you could improve this factor of performance, and started chasing it aggressively.

 

"Improve your threshold". "Move your speed-lactate curve to the right". "Pound more volume". "Make the volume closer to threshold". "You can do more of it, so do more of it". "More is better". So began the era of grinding threshold to try to maximize your aerobic gains.

 

As it turns out, even Olbrecht wasn't really an advocate for threshold training. He advocated for a mix of intensities sometimes above, and mostly below threshold as way to recruit fast-twitch muscle fibers, while adequately stimulating slow-twitch fibers.

 

The problem is that people took the bait on pushing the curve to the right, and due to the specificity of threshold improving threshold, figured that threshold was the best thing to do. The issue with training threshold 24/7 is that it's a grind, you can do a ton of it, the "bang for your buck" on adaptations is not the best, and that it can cause your anaerobic capacity / speed to deteriorate if it's overdone. Also the belief that every swimmer should be doing threshold work, and the timed 3000m swim is the best metric of swimmer development. Because people like simple things, and "threshold go brrr" is simpler than actually reading the whole book.

 

There is no swimming event that tests who has the best threshold. You might have events that are correlated to your threshold, but let's not forget that your performance on a timed 3000m swim is a function of many things: yes aerobic capacity, yes lack of anaerobic capacity, but also quality and stability of technique, desire to do a 3000m, resilience, height, etc..

 

Even Open Water racing requires strategic bursts of speed, which comes from anaerobic capacity, which is contrary to threshold system beliefs that just hammering away and holding the hardest pace that you can sustain for as long as you can is the best option.

 

They were worried about Threshold training, when they should have been more concerned with Capacity training. Because they could only measure Threshold, and Capacity was too hard of an idea to get their head around. Or, they said Threshold was the only way, and anybody that was having success on a Capacity program was doping. "It's tainted science!". Lol.

 

In the middle of "all-threshold-all-the-time" and the "really fast or really easy" we have the Pyramidal model, where you typically see something like 70% of training as long and aerobic, 20% as hard mixed aerobic / threshold, and 10% as race pace or speed.

 

One of the current big dogs in endurance research is Dr. Stephen Seiler, who is a big proponent of the Polarized model, commonly quoted as the 80/20 model. In really simple terms, he suggests that the best total endurance capacity adaptatiions come from doing 80% of your work at a relatively low intensity below threshold, and 20% of your work at a relative high intensity above threshold. That 80% is basically the structural work behind VO2Max (developing new capillaries, growing new mitochondria, adding muscle to your heart, etc.) and the 20% is the functional work (increasing your abillity to pump blood / maximizing stroke volume, increasing the function of your mitochondria, and practicing maintaining high intensity). You can still do threshold work, but it goes into the 20% bucket. And if your 20% of training would be better spent elsewhere than threshold, then you may as well spend it elsewhere!

 

Seiler also came up with a Maslow-esque hierarchy of endurance-training needs.

 

Basically, the biggest things that are going to make the biggest difference are how much you're doing (the 80%), how well you can do your hard stuff (the 20%), and if your 80% allows your 20% to be good, and vice-versa. If you do too much threshold, you'll be too tired to do quality above threshold, and then you're not really getting a quality stimulus.

 

You can also see that Seiler underrates things like Periodization, Shiny Things (altitude, heat training, etc.), Race Pace training, and Taper. I would tend to agree with him. If you do a really good job of the basic work, that can get you a 10% improvement. You won't get that if you aren't doing the work, or you aren't doing it correctly, or you have a really poorly structured program.

 

But if you do those things well, you'll be best-equipped to use periodization to maximize the transfer of your training, you'll be able to make the most of your race pace training, and then when you peel off fatigue you will probably be as best prepared as you possibly can be. Those things are generally in the range of 1-3% improvement, and let's not lose sight of the 10% that gets you in the ballpark.

 

Here's one thing (the rare original thought) that I'd like to offer. Swimming at threshold is not relaxing. It's often hard. If you look at the best swimmers, they're very relaxed when they swim fast, and they swim very fast when they're relaxed. Swimming is a skill-limited sport, and if your skill is down 10% but your fitness is up 10%, that is rarely a positive trade. If your skill is up 10%, you'll be flying, and you can always add more fitness later. Hence, training more at a lower intensity, with great skills, would seem to be the way to go. I've personally rejigged my training to move away from a pyramidal model, and more to a polarized model, and I like what I'm seeing.