GARBAGE YARDAGE

COACH'S CORNER, FEB. 2006

Ever here that term, garbage yardage? For coaches and swimmers it signifies what they feel are training sets that have no purpose, just filling in space, wasting time, so to speak. I hear it from time to time from some masters swimmers. Those who only want to do long freestyle sets, disparage any non-free sets; those who hate to kick or do stroke drills also consign those items to the garbage bin. Swimmers who stress about getting a certain number of yards in every single day don.t want to do the longer rest, quality sprint (anaerobic) sets. Everybody has an agenda.

A DAM coach, with so many swimmers of different ability levels and training philosophies has to juggle the interests of all the swimmers. The vast majority of DAM members swim for fitness and most of them were not competitive swimmers as children. Most of our training falls into the aerobic categories, promoting general fitness. We do a smaller percentage of fast, race pace swimming which increases lactate levels in your blood and hence the bodies ability to store glycogen ( the fuel you burn when you exercise) in the muscles.

Though most of the propulsion in the free and backstrokes comes from the upper body, combined with the core body rotation, the legs have an important function for masters swimmers, too: maintaining the lower body horizontal to the surface, thus reducing drag. With this in mind, a small percentage of each workout is devoted to a kick set. For the breaststroke and butterfly, the legs do supply a higher percentage of the total propulsion and should not be neglected.

Drills. Every drill we do I borrowed from an Olympic coach. Each drill has a purpose. If done correctly, the drills will improve your timing, make your stroke more efficient and, hence, make you faster without any additional effort.

Your training is what you make of it. If you don.t make an effort on kick sets, don.t pay attention and do the drills incorrectly or just loaf on the fast sets, yes, you will have plenty of garbage yardage in your workouts. Make the most of everything you do in your workout and you will improve in areas you never expected to see improvement in.