Last week I had someone ask me an interesting question on Twitter… “What’s your take on max yardage for high school swimmers” I started to write my response, but quickly realized that this is a much more complex question than I had first realized. There was absolutely no way I was providing a worthy response in 140 characters or less, so I decided to open this topic up for discussion on the blog.
Here’s the reason I was stopped in my tracks as I attempted my response…During my high school years, I swam more yards than the average swimmer will swim in an entire lifetime. Kind of joking, but not really. We swam once a day Monday through Friday with optional mornings twice/week. On Saturdays we had a brutal double that made the weekday practices look like childsplay. Nothing out of the ordinary in terms of practice frequency, but within each practice we would put in a TON of yards. Peak season weekday yardage ran from 7,000 up to over 9,000 per practice depending on what group you were in. Saturdays would easily be over 15,000 for the day, but over 20,000 was not out of the question. Throw drylands in on top of all that, and you’ve got a pretty tough training regiment. BUT guess what? IT WORKED! Our team consistently produced some of the fastest swimmers in New England, and a large portion of the team went on to swim in college.
So, is there a downside to heavy yardage for high school swimmers? Yes and No…
Obviously when you create a tough, high yardage training program like what I experienced on my high school club team, the results will be pretty damn good. The only problem I see with this is that you increase the likelihood of burnout and injury. Quite a few swimmers from our club team didn’t make it through four years of collegiate swimming, which may be attributed to the high volume training they received in high school. Maybe they injured a shoulder…Maybe they got burnt out from years of intense swimming workouts…OR maybe they just hit a wall & couldn’t drop their times any further…
Now that I think about it, that last statement above may be the biggest downside to heavy high school yardage. A lot of swimmers in heavy yardage training programs will reach their peak or close to it in high school. Thus, when they get to college they struggle to improve their times like they did in high school, and it becomes extremely frustrating training year after year with only minor improvements if anything at all. But then again, a lot of swimmers receive beneficial athletic scholarships because of their success in high school. They may not even have the option of continuing their swimming career unless they are pushed close to their peak performance in high school. Even worse, depending on their family’s financial situation, they may not even have the option of attending college if not for swimming.
So in conclusion I would say that putting in high yardage workouts in high school is beneficial and quite possibly a necessity for the serious swimmer. Of course there should be a limit to this insanity because any yardage over a reasonable amount will just be an exercise in futility. I would say that the amount of yards I swam in high school is likely close to the recommended/reasonable limit for high school swimmers on a club team (between 50,000 and 60,000 yards per week during the peak of your training season). Of course there are a lot of variables in this equation (sprinter/mid-distance/distance swimmers all require different yardages), and its probably best left up to your coach to decide what yardage is going to work best for you. If you’re not doing 50,000/60,000+ yards per week during your peak season, don’t freak out and start swimming extra just to get up to that point. That’s on the upper end of the spectrum, and lower yardage workouts still have the potential to produce the same results. 30,000 to 40,000 per week is probably a good range for the average club swimmer in high school.
How much do/did you swim in high school and do you think 50-60k+ yards per week is too much/too little during peak training?