Someone said to me this week that three minutes rest for 50m is far too much. I understand the instinct completely. It was mine for most of my swimming life.
I used to skip yoga and Pilates because I couldn’t see the point. No heart rate, no sweat, no return on investment. I wanted to feel like I’d worked. I wanted to get fitter, faster, stronger. And if I’m being honest about who I used to be, probably thinner too.
I trained as a junior swimmer to Olympic trials level. I know what a grind looks like. I’ve also done two sub six hour Rottnest solo swims, finishing seventh and eighth. I know how to train for distance. That particular flavour of hard work was so embedded in me that I couldn’t imagine another way.
Then I lost my mojo. I burned through it on events, and when the events stopped, so did I. I touched on procrastination last week, and this is the other side of that same coin. I wasn’t lazy. I was exhausted by the only approach I knew.
What changed things was reading about Cameron McEvoy, the Australian sprint swimmer who walked away from the sport and came back with a completely different training model, and watching my son train. He was training the old way. The way I used to. And he was exhausted. I wondered what would happen if I tried something different instead.
I had nothing to lose. I started from zero.
For ten weeks I swam two to three times a week, went to the gym twice a week, and at no point swam more than seven kilometres in a week. That’s it. No long sets. No grinding through fatigue. Just short, hard efforts with real rest in between.
In ten weeks I got within one to two seconds of my fastest times as a seventeen-year-old. I was a British National Medalist at that age. I am fifty-one now. My last Rottnest solo was 2014. I had, by any reasonable measure, been bobbing around at the edges of training for years.
I genuinely could not believe it.
Since April, we’ve been running Tuesday sprint sessions in Margaret River. I can see the difference in the swimmers who come on a Tuesday. The pace they hold in their Friday endurance sessions has changed. And this week I coached a group of women over sixty doing the same work. Their heart rates were up, they were working hard, they were fabulous. They owned the rest gleefully.
Here is the simple version of why it works.
To really change your speed, you need to tap into your central nervous system. To do that, you need to be able to go genuinely fast, not just fast-for-a-tired-person. And to go genuinely fast again and again, you need to let your body fully recover between efforts.
Three minutes on 50s isn’t too much rest on a sprint set. It might even not be enough.
When I ask swimmers to slow down between their fast bits, I want them breathing calmly by the time the next effort comes. Not recovered-ish. Calm. If they’re still puffing, the next 25 isn’t going to be as fast as it could be. They’re not going to tap into anything new. They’re just going to accumulate more tiredness.
The old version of me did 50s on 45 seconds. I was fit. I was not getting faster. What I was doing was building fatigue on top of fatigue and calling it training.
Now I go to the gym and lift whatever I can lift well that day. I’m not going by numbers, I’m going by feel, and as a trend the weights are getting heavier. In the pool, I sprint and rest. And I feel better than I have in a very long time.
Slow, slower. Fast, faster. Rest days, properly restful. It was counterintuitive, to old me but this me loves it.
Sprint sets aren’t for everyone and that’s genuinely fine. But if you try them, the rest isn’t there to give you a breather. It’s doing the actual work. The reason I got within two seconds of my teenage personal best at fifty-one wasn’t the fast bits alone. It was fast, then properly recovered, then fast again. The effort and the recovery are both the training. Trust the rest.