Bob Bowman runs the Texas men’s team and the best stable of Olympic champs perhaps the world has ever seen. And he still has time to go to ASCA clinics and tell everyone EXACTLY how he does everything.

Speaking of ASCA, check out their upcoming clinics in Napa!

Special thanks to Dr. Paul Kalas from Crete for allowing me to share this video with you. If you love open water swimming and traveling, check out the island of Crete in the middle of the Mediterranean. Dr. Paul wrote a swim travel guide with over 20 locations around the beautiful, historic island.

Here are my notes from this Bobby B talk…

Coach Bowman’s Weekly Practice Schedule Breakdown by Energy Zones

Core belief: build an energy-system template first, then plug strokes/skills into it.

• “Our basic program is nine sessions per week… three mornings.”

• He runs a repeatable weekly structure:

  Monday AM = Power/Resistance
  Monday PM = Threshold (Jon Urbanchek colors)
  Tuesday Late AM = Active Rest (LCM)
  Wednesday AM = Technical/Aerobic
  Wednesday PM = VO2 Max
  Thursday PM = Threshold/aerobic (LCM)
  Friday AM = Power/Resistance
  Friday PM = Technical w/Kicking Focus
  Saturday AM = VO2 Max

• “Now we have our kind of energy systems in place… you have this template and then every week it is like this.”

Swimnerd’s Takeaway: Athletes don’t improve from random good practices - they improve from a repeatable system that hits the right stress and recovery cycles. It’s okay if you do the same sets a lot.

Stop calling it “power training” (especially for age groupers)

Core belief: “power” is misused and harmful in club culture.

• “Resistance training is a much better way to think about it.”

• “If you coach anybody that’s not a post grad or in college, you do not do power training in club swimming… It doesn’t happen.”

• “You're just trying to give them something they're gonna get in college. So by the time they get to us, they've already had it and they don't get better. Give them what they need to have at that age.”

Swimnerd’s Takeaway: Don’t copy NCAA/pro concepts into 12–16 year olds just to feel advanced. “Build what they need now” reminds me of what Eddie Reese told me about giving American age groupers the necessary aerobic base.

“Repetition is the highest form of learning” - Aristotle

Core belief: do things repeatedly

• “Repetition is the highest form of learning… Do things repeatedly.”

• “You are not there to keep them perfectly excited… you’re there to teach them.”

• “Just do breaststroke for six weeks and see what happens.”

• The standard isn’t doing it once in practice: “When you get a hundred more of those, you’ll be rich.”

Swimnerd’s Takeaway: If a stroke/skill matters, commit to it for weeks, not days. Don’t confuse “variety” with “development.”

Resistance can TEACH feel

Core belief: adding resistance can help athletes “feel” the water and fix mechanics.

• “Adding some resistance… makes ’em feel it better.”

• Sierra Runge example: couldn’t improve kick until socks added resistance — “her feet actually held water.”

Swimnerd’s Takeaway: Use resistance creatively to teach, not just to make it hard.

Weights AFTER swimming

Core belief: protect the quality of the primary sport.

• “Always after swimming. I don’t want weights to affect my swimming.”

• “I coach the swimming team, not the weight lifting team… If some sacrifice, it’s the weights.”

Swimnerd’s Takeaway: Strength supports swim training; it doesn’t get to sabotage it. At least when it comes to training for 200’s and 400’s.

Energy Systems & Interval Controls

Core belief: intervals are a coaching lever to control physiology.

• “I’m an interval squasher… you can control the intensity of the aerobic work that way.”

• Too much rest breaks the intended system:

  • “If you give somebody a 200 and they get a minute rest, that is not red pace…”

• He gives rules of thumb:

  • Threshold work should have short rest. 10 seconds for 100’s. 20 seconds for 200’s. 30 seconds for 300/400’s.

  • The target is a range, not a perfect number: “I’m trying to get in a range.”

Swimnerd’s Takeaway: If you don’t control the rest, you don’t control the energy zone, you don’t control the training.

“You must fall in love with kicking.”

Core belief: kicking is both physiology and technique.

• “You must fall in love with kicking. You must fall out of love with social kicking.”

• Real kicking: “people are breathing so hard, they cannot speak.”

• Every session includes kicking: “minimum of a thousand… probably 1500.”

• Major kick day: track and build over time (best average, test sets).

• Kick sets aren’t just conditioning - they teach mechanics.

• Adding resistance (socks) can help teach mechanics.

• 1000 kick for time teaches foot pressure/holding water: “in a period of a thousand… you start figuring out how to hold water.”

Swimnerd’s Takeaway: If you want better swimmers, you need better kickers - but it must be measured and progressed. If you are a disciple of Coach Maglischo, you probably already kick a lot - his minimum kick was even higher!

Bob’s Fly Philosophy: small doses, frequent exposure, protect technique

Core belief: fly is fragile - it must be trained without destroying mechanics.

• “If their worst stroke is fly… you just gotta get their fly better.”

• “Give him fly every other day… we do that in small doses all the time.”

• He avoids long fly repeats often: “I don’t do long repeats of it… it has to be good technique, good kick…”

Swimnerd’s Takeaway: We do a ton of fly on the Swimnerd Masters team. I think it is one of the best ways to get everyone toughened up and ready to rock in the open water (our main focus). This past Saturday we did 950 yards fly - so nearly 50% of the workout was 25’s fly with kick count/stroke count focused.

Peak lactate is 3 mins after the effort

Core belief: he chooses intervals to target blood lactate timing.

Set: 100 fast + 100 easy on 4:00 (“easy-fast”)

• “Peak blood lactate occurs three minutes after the effort…”

• Interval rationale: effort (~1 min) + ~3 min = next start = peak lactate.

• “If you want to finish 200s, this is the kind of sets you do.”

• He’s kept it for 30 years: “I never would leave this out.”

• He progresses it seasonally (10 reps → 3 reps, add 200 easy, descend patterns).

Swimnerd’s Takeaway: This is a masterclass in why a set exists.

Train Strengths, Not Weaknesses

Core belief: don’t turn strengths into average by spending all year “fixing” weaknesses.

• “I do believe you train their strengths and not spend too much time on the weaknesses.”

Swimnerd’s Takeaway: You still address weaknesses but your performance ceiling comes from maximizing strengths.

Bob Bowman Workouts

Threshold / Aerobic Threshold (Red Pace)

Fly threshold set (LCM example)

Backstroke threshold on freestyle intervals

Jack Bauerle fly threshold set

Threshold test

Max VO₂ / Lactate Tolerance (“Fast–Easy”)

Bob’s flagship VO₂ / lactate tolerance set

The “how it’s swum” clarification (it’s a straight 200)

Late-season progression variation

Michael Phelps butterfly example (built from this same set)

Active Rest / Aerobic Blend (50/50 anaerobic–aerobic)

What “active rest” is (definition)

Power / Resistance (Buckets, Chutes, Skill-with-Resistance)

What’s inside the “power” day (his words)

Kicking Focus (Skill + Muscular Endurance)

Daily kick volume

Big kick day examples

Why the kick-for-time matters (Phelps breast kick)

A threshold-set kicking example

Underwater / Breath Control (advanced + age-group adaptation)

The advanced underwater fin set

The age-group scaled version (his own suggested adaptation)

Recovery / Skill-Based Aerobic (“Go at your own pace”)

The 6K continuous recovery day

Free-IM Aerobic Work

Free-IM definition + why it’s useful

Fly set for constant exposure (end-of-practice example)

30x50s 5 free 5 fly on :35 SCY

The video is hard to hear. So, here is a full transcript:

Our basic program is nine sessions per week. Okay. So we got three mornings. Um, I'm gonna make this simplistic, but yeah. Okay. I'll get into my soapbox in a minute. We would call this power training. Resistance training is a much better way to think about it.

And here I am propagating something that I can't stand. Somebody said, what would be the one thing you could do that would make swimming better? And I was like, never use this word again. Particularly if you coach anybody that's not a post grad or in college, you do not do power training in club swimming.

It doesn't happen. You're just trying to give them something they're gonna get in college. So by the time they get to us, they've already had it and they don't get better. Give them what they need to have at that age. Another topic anyway, power training. Okay. This one is gonna be uh, kind of technical or aerobic.

This is gonna be what we call straight up threshold training. The Jon Urbanchek colors. You know what it is? We actually do an am. It's a late AM here, and this will be active rest. And this is long course meters. These are short. Wednesday, we're doing a training at max VO2.

We're coming back Thursday with another. It's, it is threshold slash aerobic in the long course. Uh, Friday afternoon is a mix. It could be technical work, but a lot of times it is a big kicking emphasis. Okay. Saturdays VO2 Max Or something like that. Kind of depends on

who we're,

now we have our kind of energy systems in place, right?

So you have this template and then every week it is like this. For the most part, you know, in the early season, I don't do the power right away. I try to avoid it as long as I can, and then when I can't wait anymore, I do something mainly because they think they need to have it, not because. Right. But we're doing it, and this is working with the buckets, it's chutes, which I like.

It's uh, actually quite a bit of underwater kicking, which I love. Um, there's a little bit of pulling in there. There's definitely speed work in there. It's kind of a, a mix of things. So you've got that going Monday or Friday. How do we decide what stroke they do on those? It's usually something they're trying to develop.

Carson does breaststroke here and here exclusively. 'cause he loves the way his stroke is after. When he does the resistance on breast, it really helps his stroke get together. And by kind of building that up, it's gotten much, much better. There is this, you know, there's definitely some truth to the fact that if you want to teach somebody a skill, adding some resistance to it makes 'em feel it better.

I had a, um, this girl, Sierra Runge, right? This giant girl. She was like six five, big girl. She had tiny little feet in hands. That's crazy. She just had a baby. But anyway, she is very small, feet in hands and she was a terrible kicker. But when you come into my group, you're kicking, right? And I was like, we're gonna make her a.

I put her in that lane and we did kicking and kicking and kicking. I yelled and I was nice and I did all the things I could do to make her a kicker. She didn't get one bit better. Not at all. It's a lot of time spent on this for no re no reward, no. And then we were doing some things where during this session I had her kick with socks and I was like, wow, she's probably gonna drown and better watch her.

She was better than anybody with socks because her feet actually held water. So the resistance was helping her learn how to kick it. So that's something you could do, but I think this is something you're trying to develop. So, but it's one stroke and it's all the time. Here's another thing that I think coaches are very reticent to embrace.

Repetition. Highest form of learning. That's Aristotle, not me, but I wholeheartedly agree. Do things repeatedly. You are not there to keep them, you know, perfectly excited. Every minute of every practice you're there to teach them how to do things, and you cannot make these changes without repeating things.

So somebody would be like, you know. Well, we'll do breast here. We'll do fly the next week we'll come back in breast and then maybe we'll do backstroke on that one. No, just do breast stroke for six weeks and see what happens. Okay. It's it's simple. Take all this kind of, well, they need variation. No, they don't.

They need to learn how to do it, and then they need to practice it enough to know how to do it, and then they have to make it stable. You know? It's like these kids in practice, like my guys get so excited. Because they'll push a time and practice and they think that means they're at a certain level. And then of course I'll give 'em my favorite.

I'm like, well, when you get a hundred more of those, you'll be rich. And I'm not lying. That's a concept Michael used all the time. Michael and I use that all the time. If he did a certain time on a certain thing we were doing in practice, he, he would say and say, man, if I could get 30 or 40 more of those between now and nationals, I'll have.

That's what it takes. It doesn't take doing it one time having an ice cream party. It takes doing it over and over and over again. And you know what? They'll get into it. 'cause they'll know that it's gonna give 'em what they want if you go through this process. So just kinda stick with stuff is my point.

When we come here, my big proclivity is to do freestyle on Monday afternoons in the threshold work. But I also do them backstroke. I once in a blue moon, I do something with butterfly and breasts. It's actually easier to do with breasts than fly like 10x400's fly. So, you know, what do you do? A, a, a threshold set for fly would be something like this.

Um, you got three sets of 10x100's and maybe take 30 seconds in between if you like. And this, I'm gonna say it's Long Course. I'm pretending it's Long Course. Um, you would go one (round) on 1:20 and it's all free. You would go 1:25, it's one free, one fly, and then you go 1:30, all 10 fly at red pace, right?

Because it's gonna be red pace. You're doing that and the heart rate's gonna be up. That would be a threshold set for fly, and you could do that a couple times a season. I don't think there's anything wrong with that or even sneak it in in other sets. I kind of sneak it in in the mornings, but. That's something you can do, but mainly you're gonna do this endurance working free.

You can do it at back, back works great. My best back stroke is go on the freestyle intervals and just do the same thing. Got that from Mark Schubert, what he did with Lenny Krayzelburg. So I started doing it and it, it, it works. Okay. Here we're going active rest, so we're going 50 50 anaerobic aerobics. So we're going something at a speed and something easy, and most of the rest is easy.

Okay. My big pro proclivity this time, this season is to do half back and half breast. So the first half of the set is back, second half of the set is breast. Wow. How did we come up with that? I had to think a long time. About 10 seconds. Why don't we do back and then breast? Alright, so they're getting back and breast.

They're getting free. They're getting their weak stroke here or something they want to work on. Maybe it's their third stroke. This is a mix and it's usually, um, a recovery. 'cause these are tough sessions, right? And they're doing the weights here (Tues/Thurs/Sat). You wanted to know after swimming? No. Yeah. Always after swimming.

I don't want weights to affect my swimming. I coach the swimming team, not the weight lifting team. Weight lifting. So if some sacrifice, it's the weights. The coach knows that. He's very good about it.

If I just had 50 freestylers, they might lift and not swim before, but I don't particularly, this group is all 400 people and 200 people. But so you see this is gonna be recovery and it's gonna be something that our kids love. Go at your own pace, which go at your own pace. They call it go off. It's really gay off and nobody can sit it.

But anyway, go at your own pace and, but it's 6K. Go at your own pace. It is a series of sets and they go straight through it. Sometimes it's seven, sometimes it's five. Kind of depends on where we are at the end is three, but it's a continuous thing and it's all skill-based and it, it changes and this is almost always doing all the strokes, so it'll be, they'll get that in there.

Just kind of a low level aerobic swimming, but I say low level aerobic swimming. They'll do the 6K in for sure. An hour and 10 minutes. They'll move. I mean, we move. Um, we'll do max VO two, our quality work in the afternoon, and this is usually their best stroke. So this is where the butterflies are gonna get their thing, right?

The backstrokers and breaststrokers. They might get a double dose. That's okay. Yep. Um, so it's gonna be quality work and you'll pick a stroke that you think is probably their best stroke.

This is where in the main part of the season, they will get the actual IM's together, this aerobic work here. Okay. And this is normally where my favorite day in the world shows up that I got from Murray Stevens. It's called Free-IM. Free-IM is free back breast free. And the reason free IM is powerful is you can train it almost like freestyle and you can get to the intensities and you can go on short rest and you can do big sets of it.

You can do anything you want with it and the butterfly's not messing it up, you know what I mean? Soon as they do butterfly heart rate spikes. So technique is terrible. They go easy on backstroke, they do all this stuff, but if you just put free in there, the intensity can be the same and it's more aerobic and you can target what you want to do.

You can do it quality as well. Um, but you know, this is where we would do the Free-IM work. This is where we do the big ladders. Everybody loves to do in my group, they like to talk about it. I don't know if they like to do it, but, you know, just aerobic swimming, but you're using all the strokes and this is the one time in the middle of the season that they're getting kind of the parts all put together back to your power work that you did on Monday.

And then the kicking set. We have been working quite a bit on kicking and um, I'm gonna talk about this in my next thing. The essentials of coaching. You must fall in love with kicking. You must fall out of love with social kicking.

That's not kicking. That's talking. Kicking is when people are breathing so hard, they cannot speak. That is kicking. Yeah, mitochondrial development. Dr. Picard just told me like, give him a podcast. Okay. Right. You're out of breath. We kick all, every one of these sessions is gonna have kicking in it a lot of it.

Probably a minimum of a thousand yards, probably 1500 every one of these sessions. Okay. But on this day, it is gonna have a major, it might be 3K worth of kick. Here might be a 1000 for time, it might be 2000 for time, it might be 20x100's Best Average, it might be 10x50's on a minute your best average on two minutes your best average.

We varied, right? And we keep track of the results and we build it up over time. Build it up over time, build it up over time. Probably the best way that we got Michael Phelp's breaststroke better was this day (Friday big kick day) 'cause he would do breast stroke. And I'd give him a thousand breast stroke kick for time and he would work it. And in a period of a thousand with no breaks, you start figuring out how to hold water on your feet.

That's why you do that stuff. It's not for aerobic condition. There's 10 better ways of that. It's to learn how to do things. Muscular endurance and muscle memory. Right? And do it enough that you can experiment with it. That's what these are. Um. That's a, I think, super important for us. And then we come back with the quality, and this is probably for IM'ers.

It might be freestyle again to end the week. It just depends on what they've been doing. Right? If they did back here, maybe they do breast there. If they did breast here, maybe they do back or fly there. You know, it is kind of like we're trying to give them something of every part, every week. And the ones that probably change the most are this and this.

In terms of what stroke you're gonna do,

I don't know. You can do anything. But what we did Saturday is kind of one of my favorites, and this is, is incredibly complicated set. It is a hundred fast and a hundred easy on four minutes. You can do 10, you can do eight, you can do four. You can do as many as you like. But that's the kind of work I'm talking about with Max VO2.

Why do we go on four minutes?

We go on four minutes? Because when you do an effort, right, you are gonna reach your peak blood lactate three minutes after the effort. The effort takes a minute. Where will you be at your peak club lactate when you start the next one? This is called Lactate Tolerance. If you want to finish 200's, this is the kind of sets that you do.

It is ideal for 200 swimmers, and I have been doing this now for 30 years. I never would leave this out. They all call it easy, fast, although it's always fast, easy, but they like to call it easy, fast. So they know what it's gonna be. They know how to do it. I've kind of like tweaked it. Sometimes I say descend one to three and then hold it 'cause they descend 'em anyway.

No matter how much you warm up, you work for 4,000, it'll still take the first two to get into, but you can do this and then you can taper it down so that I end up with, uh, one week before the big meet. Sometimes I'll go a hundred fast and a 200 easy and descend them one to three. So they'll start a kind of an effort and then a really good one and then rip one right with a 200 easy in between.

And that's just kind of like, not even on the intervals, just kind of when I feel like they need to go, but it kind of follows from here. And you know, the best Mike thing Michael ever did. One week before Beijing, I decided we're gonna do this butterfly. And I was worried about it because he had done it before, uh, un suited and before the 2008, he had gone 53 flat on the last 100.

Pretty good. No suit. So I'm like, we are for sure suiting up. So I suited his ass off leg suit and he went 55, 53, 51.6 from a push the dude was fit, he got out and I was like, well, I'm on vacation now. It's all up to you. Have fun. I did my job, my job. He was like, wow, that's pretty good. Like, yeah, my

bad.

But that's, I say that not to wow you with Michael swimming because everybody knows he's a great swimmer, but just to say this is how it flows from a set where he was doing 10 of these. On four minutes and then as we went through the season, we would decrease it to where he would do three and actually the first time he started doing three, I would just do it on four minutes.

You know, like normal, but descended. And then if you, as they get better and better and they keep putting up these times, you gotta find ways for them to keep getting better. So that's where the 200 easy came in. You know, the, the, the problem you have with all these high performance is they start doing this crazy shit in practice and you gotta come back and see how can they do better?

A lot of times you can't do better. So you, you engineer these things when you need it and sometimes you just let 'em live with their results, which is another way to get you stuck. But if you were trying to work on, IM swimming, whatever you do, and I don't, I wouldn't have a, a pose if you were doing age group swimming, I would do free because this is better to start the week and then maybe you work on fly.

Maybe you work on flying back, maybe you do breast stroke, like you can do it, you know, pretty basic with 10 year olds. And one thing I did find with my age group swimmers when I first got into this, I wrote out this whole like plan for their development of all the strokes. And it was in a notebook, and it was very detailed, but true to my belief that repetition is the highest full of learning.

I did six weeks of freestyle and then I had six weeks of backstroke and I had six weeks of breaststroke and I had six weeks of butterfly. I kind of did butterfly lines 'cause they were younger, right. And what I learned was, number one, that is incredibly boring. I mean, my god. And when you leave the freestyle for 18 weeks, it doesn't, it goes away.

So I would do one day, one day, one day, and just keep cycling that. You know what I mean? So every week they're getting it, and then over the big period of time, they're getting the repetition of these skills. That would be my advice on that thing. Any questions about this? Yep.

Uh, so what stroke are they doing for the Friday Power set?

I know

they're doing the same as Monday, so whatever. And they don't all do the same stroke. I mean, you could do, if you're like, you know, you could decide it's the same stroke, but like. Some people are doing fly, some are back, some are breast. Just kind of depending on what we feel like they need to do.

Okay. And then you're switching it six weeks later?

Yeah, something like that. Probably something different.

And what about the kick set Is your weak stroke?

Yeah. Kick set could be weak or strong. Just depends. Okay. Yeah. I don't always do their weak stroke. I do believe you train their strengths and not spend too much time on the weaknesses.

Yeah.

Um, on Thursdays, when you say threshold slash aerobic

Yeah.

Are you saying aerobic is below threshold?

I am. When I say threshold, okay, here's a whole two hours. But the bottom line is I am training up to the anaerobic threshold. What is the anaerobic threshold? Kids, the point at which blood lactate cannot be cleared, it begins to accumulate in their system, right?

So below that is purely aerobic. So the, you know, in the old days, white, pink and then threshold is red. That's a pretty specific thing. This is, you know, probably four to six milli mos of lactate if you measured it. It's doable, but it's the best kind of, I think it's the, it is the break points, the threshold between anaerobic work and aerobic.

So it's a great place to train. Yes sir.

On that front. So when you're doing the colors in freestyle, every notes that you calculate that right based. Test sets. Yep. For fly. Yeah. When you're doing those, are you, are you just going based on heart rate?

Yeah, I'm going on heart rate and you're just kind of manipulating it with the interval so that you know that they're kind of in those ranges.

That's, I know that's hard to say, but like when they're going on 1:30 fly and they're pretty much doing their best average, that is a red pace. They're not gonna be doing. Race pace on that if you're doing 10 of them. Right. So if they're kind of defaulting to it, right. And then you measure their heart rates.

Yeah. Great question. Yes.

Um, you said, uh, the stroke before there were stroke is important. What?

If their worst stroke is fly,

that's the Sunday go to church.

If their worst stroke is fly, you just gotta get their fly better. And I do have a philosophy on fly. A very, very good coach told me one time, if you just give him an a fly every other day, they'll be a good swimmer. And we do that in small doses all the time. Like when I, when I do one main set of fly a week, typically short repeats for us.

I don't do long repeats of it, but it has to be good technique, good kick, all those things. But in all of these, I'm somehow putting fly in. There's fly on the here (Monday), there's some fly here (Wed). Not too much, but there's definitely fly like in this part somewhere (Tues), sometime at the end or you know, there'll be some fly work here (Fri).

There might be some work here (Sat). You know, like I do crazy stuff. Like it ain't really crazy, but it works. But people don't want to do it. But they would do, um, let's say we finished practice and we're really going for it. They do the threshold work. The last thing, let's say we're in the yards. It's probably something like 30x50's.

And if I'm really mean, they'll all be on :35. And they'll be five free, five fly, you know, work it. Sometimes I'll go with the fly on :40 if I'm really nice, but usually it's just on :35. So that's how you kind of get 'em to be able to do it. If they do enough of it all the time, don't just wait for one set a week to try to make that better, but technically they've gotta be good.

Right? And then you're gonna have to decide. How you can squeeze it in. I would have the Mondays and Fridays with fly. Probably. That would be their thing. Learn how to hold onto the water kick. What do they not do? Well? They swim like this. You're thinking about some kid.

Um, just like it's really kicking.

Ah, they just pull it.

Yeah.

That's it. Here, here. Kick there. Make 'em kick. You know, I'll give the example of the thing that we're doing now on these Mondays and Fridays, how they end. Because if I told you how we ended up, you would say that is the furthest thing from power and yet it is. So that's why I don't think power's a great name for this.

It's more resistance training, but our underwater work. Would look like this at the end of the whatever we're doing with the buckets and the chutes and that kind of thing, it's gonna be a set like this. And I'm gonna make this real simple. It is 4x25's Free swim on :20 4x25's on :20, and this with fins, okay?

Sometimes (???) under fast on 20. And then 3, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1. Hey, guess what? This happened two or three times of this, except for round two. The swim is fly hard, not free, easy. That's round two. Round three, everything on 15. What? That's how they get good at staying underwater and kicking hearted.

Do not do this with your age group swimmers. Do not do this. Just telling you what it looks like and what you're trying to work towards. For you, it looks like this.

Sorry, just

showing off. I'm kind of excited about this, but it is like the hardest thing that we do. It's one of the harder things that we do when we go to places.

Like it could be like a 25 Free on :30, right? And then. One times 12 and a half under fast and swim easy, right? I'm saying 30, make it 40. It doesn't matter. And then you can go one times free on 30, and you can try one times 25 fast. If they're good at that. I don't know. You probably got 11, 12 that could do that.

Maybe 13, 14's, and do a couple rounds of that. The key element in these underwaters is that they have breathing time on the wall. And for young kids, they have a full recovery before these, what we're teaching with these other guys that what you don't understand is 4x25's on :20 is full recovery.

For my swimmers, they swim easy and even when they do a fly, they're getting 10 seconds and when they kick, they're getting 10 seconds, so they're getting one to one work to rest. You just don't want to do it so that they're coming up, taking one breath and then pushing off again. Right? I guess if they're going on 15, it's kind of like that, but there's very small amounts of it.

Very fast. Okay. Yes.

Yeah. Going back to, uh, the fast easy set, you, you, I just wanna make sure I understand and, and adapt it for younger source. Um, so your first rendition of hundred hundred, they're doing that as a straight 200 swim.

You're talking about here,

you were writing around this.

Oh, this thing that was over here?

Yeah. They're doing like,

they're going a hundred fly swim and then a hundred free easy as a straight 200, as a straight to, like, they'll cut, they get their time. Touch, get your time. So I'm a hundred easy 'cause it's all four minutes is a long time ago.

Got it. Alright.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Thank

you.

This what this would look like.

Let's say you did 4x150 backstroke and a 50 easy and it's, this is long course, so I'll just give it to you. Long course. I should have given you the Monday in yard. Um. Probably on three minutes. And the, this is December one to four, and then they're probably gonna go into 6x100's back.

This is actually what we did. 1:30 is the whole thing. Plus a, no, sorry. Uh, two 15 plus a 50. Easy. Right. And this is descend one to three And hold it. Probably something like that. And then we're probably gonna end up with 8x50's. 50, back 50, easy on one 30 and it's descend 1-3 and hold it on the fifties.

That's active rest. The key element of active rest is it's not, the interval's not so big that their heart rate drops in between. Right? And this is pushing it. This is a pretty generous interval for the guys that have some, um. Then you would, I would probably go right into breast, but what I would, you could even do the same thing.

But my breast actually looked like this. I did 4x150's, and that's 50. Kick, kick, pull. 50 single, double single drill, 50 swim. Plus a 50 easy. And I actually did 3:20, I think, or 3:30, maybe 3:30. And then the last thing for them was 4 rounds of 4x50's at a pace plus a 50 easy.

And it was on 1:40. And the first round of four is at 200 speed plus one. The second round of four is at 200. The last one's 200 minus. This, this is actually the actual set from last week. So that's kind of, so you got back then you're gonna have to go into breasts. I don't like doing breaststroke, like a lot of 150's long course breaststroke would be terrible.

So that's why I do the parts. And now I like to do the fifties. 'cause they're also already kind of tired, right? They've already done the thing. Yeah.

Um, on your.

It is a 50 kick. Kick. Oh, single, double, single. So it's right arm, double, left arm. And I make 'em start over. Right. Double left. I don't, I don't come back. I don't know because they get more single arms that way. Yeah.

I going back when you mentioned about kicking. Yep.

Same theme all the way through.

No, I vary it. Um, kicking on the power work is vertical kicking with weights. Maybe.

I Sorry. Still keep the same theme for that practice.

Yeah. Yeah. It, it is within the theme of the practice. And, and it can be d the kicking, it is like an animal of its own right. Like the kicking in the threshold sets is probably, it's in part of the, one of the things that we do, which I really like, I got it from NBAC.

Um, the first thing we do is really long and it has swimming like your warmup, swimming, it has a preset, it has kicking at, usually has pulling in, and it's all one thing. So as part of that, it's gonna be a thousands probably kick and it could be just any kind of thing, right? Sometimes it's on short arrest.

Like one that we would do a lot is we would probably go like, um, and this depends on the day, but I would go 2x50's on this is the shorty yards 45, just kind of moderate and then 1x100 hard, just hard effort. And you know, when you're trying to get. I don't get too fancy with it, but I just say a hundred hard, just work it.

Okay. It doesn't have to be your lifetime best, but it shouldn't be like terrible. Right. And work it on 1:20, maybe five of those, and you can extrapolate that down to your Asia. Number two on a minute, one on one A 50. Right? Something like that. Um, one of the things that I think is important is that you have a way of kind of talking about intensities.

And we have a lot of 'em. Um, when I went to France, they were, they were like, wow, you got a lot of ways to stay fast and slow. I'm like, yeah, I do.

Our favorite one is this. If you ever look at our workouts, you'll see medium. Medium. Hard, hard, hard, hard. If I told you that, you know exactly what I was saying, right? But I don't want easy, right? Like otherwise you get into a French descend. I learned with my own Martian. I'm going a French descend is. A French descend is you don't try at all on the first ones and on the last one you try harder than anybody ever tried in the history of it drives the kids crazy when he does that and me like, you know, well, I don't go, like if I don't tell 'em exactly what to do, and it says descend one to four, like, I don't know, a hundred free, it'll be like 56.

55, 51, 45.2. And I'll be like, no. So it, it is like you're kind of working on a lot of different levels there. Um, oh, you want another fly threshold set? Who asked me that? Oh, you asked me that. Yeah, Joe asked me, um, I got this from Jack Baurle. Okay. Again, change it. Change the numbers for your swimmers, but this is just something that Leon did and Luca, Orlando and Ilya Kharun and those guys did.

But you could go like 30x100's, 1 on 1:10 Free, one on 1:05, 1 fly on a minute. These are people that go 1:36 in the 2 Fly, right? So it's like I'm, it can be 1:30, 1:25 whatever you want it to be, right? 1:20. Um, and these are just kind of like I told actually Leon, he had to be under a minute on these, under 55 on these and under 50 on these, and he did.

So that's a threshold set for sure. There's nothing, but you can't, it cannot be that you do it on the interval. You know, I'm a interval squasher from way back and that's why, 'cause you can control the intensity of the aerobic work that way. Actually, any of the work that way. Yeah. Anybody else? Sorry. Sorry.

I'll go back.

Um, so my code growing up even get our threshold time by taking our 200 to five, two, add seven. Yeah. And that was like a hundred mm-hmm. Threshold time. Is that still like relevant? There's

a number of different ways to derive your threshold times.

Yeah.

You can do it off of a time trial, like a 200 time trial.

And what I use is Jon Urbanchek actually developed and Jim Richardson developed algorithm that you could put it in and it would give you a statistical number. Right, right. Of what these spaces should be.

Yeah.

Um, the original way to do it would be a 3000 for time. Right. The 30 minutes T 30, everybody T 30. Uh, and the problem with that is you're gonna get one good one, and after that it ain't gonna be any good.

And I don't care. 'cause I would just take the paces off of that and then adjust 'em myself as they go. I just take them faster. But the way we do it is on a test of like three hundreds. Like we would probably go 10x300's descend one to three and hold it and it would be on an interval where they might get 20 seconds rest, whatever that is.

'cause that's ideal threshold training is about 20 seconds. Rest for like a 400 to 300. 200 for a hundred is probably 10. And above that you're getting into different areas. You know, I talked a lot about these intervals. How you choose these intervals is very important because if you give somebody a 200 and they get a minute rest, that is not red pace, that's way up in the blue, green, whatever, and they're going hard, they need to have about 10 seconds rest for a hundred.

Right? If you're doing a 200, 20 is bang on. for a 300, 20 works great. 400 could be 30. I mean, you can adjust it a lot. None of this is like, we don't know a lot of it, but you learn that you want to be in a range, right? That's what your target is. Your target is to be in a range of energy systems.