Here’s another great thread from the Discussion Forum. This question by a college swimmer, produced a truly stimulating exchange of ideas about training and performance. I’ll publish highlights in several blogs — to allow interesting topics to stand alone – but I encourage you to read the entire series of posts in the thread "swimming beyond college?"

I have just finished my senior year in college swimming. My freshman year I dropped huge amounts of time. The next three years I improved far less, and even went slower in 50 and 100 Free at my final meet than I did freshman year.

I’ve trained much better, making sets, I would have never made my freshman year. I’ve consistently outswum teammates in training, who then swim 2 to 3 seconds faster than me in the 100 during meets. And all aspects of technique have improved…but my times have remained stagnant. Why?

You mentioned consistently beating teammates in practice who swim much faster in races. Have you considered the possibility that your efforts to "win" practice swims may be partly responsible for "losing" on race day?

Joe Novak, one of the swimmers mentioned in the article Richard linked to about my work with the Army sprinters, trained with Jason Lezak (who swam that amazing anchor leg for the US gold-medal-winning 4 x 100 relay in Beijing) for 18 months leading up to the 2004 Olympic Trials. He told me something really revealing about Jason. Their coach, Dave Salo (now the head coach at USC), put great emphasis on "quality" training, which Joe said basically meant going hard on everything.

Joe said that Jason went last in their lane most of the time, swam slower than anyone else in the group 90% of the time, but then would pick his spots and  swim blazingly fast repeats.

This conforms closely with something Jonty Skinner (who set the World Record for 100m Free in 1976) told me when he was Performance Science Director for USA Swimming. Jonty said that, the swimmer who is fastest on race day is not the one with the most highly tuned aerobic system, but the one with the most highly tuned nervous system.

Jonty added that few swimmers understand the true role of aerobic training. It takes only 8 to 10 weeks of training to reach aerobic fitness. The rest of the season the primary role of aerobic training should be to aid in restoration and recovery, not to continue trying to gain fitness.

The reason for that role is that your muscles need to be fresh and responsive on the "quality days" in your training week. If they’re fresh, you’ll be able to do practice repeats on those days — no more than twice a week — that imprint the coordination for a combination of Stroke Length and Rate that converts to very fast swimming. If your aerobic training between quality days is even a little bit too effortful, you won’t be sufficiently recovered on quality day and your nervous system imprinting — and your races — will suffer.