One way to assess the effectiveness of traditional training is to ask: If swimming longer and harder makes you faster, why are so many people pleading “How do I get faster.” If you’ve tried swimming harder, you’ve probably discovered the only thing it’s guaranteed to do is make you tired. Lactate Tolerance, VO2max, etc. are simply complicated versions of Swimming Harder. To find a better solution, we need a better understanding of the problem.
The problem we face in swimming faster is the need to find ways to overcome three speed-limiters that are as inevitable as death and taxes: Energy, Resistance and Age.
Energy
Quite simply, human swimmers are energy-wasting machines. This simply reflects that, as terrestrial mammals in an aquatic environment, we’re fish-out-of-water.
This makes it clear that Metabolic training is aimed at solving the wrong problem. Rather than make more energy available, we have virtually limitless opportunity to waste less. Only neuro-muscular training can do that.
Resistance
Water resistance increases exponentially as we swim faster. This, plus the findings of certain studies of swimming speed [*], should make us rethink the idea that more power is the way to swim faster.
This confirms that Muscular training is also designed to solve the wrong problem. Increasing power won’t make us faster. Reducing resistance will. Again, only neuro-muscular training is capable of that!
Age
The final speed-limiter we face is that beginning in our mid-30s, each passing year saps a bit of our aerobic capacity and muscular power. Assiduous training can reduce, but not stop, those losses. Thus, if we focus exclusively — or even primarily — on working hard, all we have to look forward to is the prospect of steadily losing speed.
In contrast, recent research has shown that the brain and nervous system can continue to improve function at least into our 70s – four extra decades of potential improvement. While nothing guarantees that Neuro-muscular training will result in swimming faster as we age, it markedly improves our chances of, at the very least, minimizing age-related declines, and — particularly if we began swimming in adulthood — improving in middle-age and beyond. Not only can we hone skills decades longer than we can improve aerobically, neural training is also far more accurately targeted on the capabilities that actually make us faster.
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Excerpt taken from unpublished materials written by Coach Terry Laughlin.
[*] Editor’s Note: study descriptions removed from this post to keep it compact.
This confirms that Muscular training is also designed to solve the wrong problem. Increasing power won’t make us faster. Reducing resistance will. Again, only neuro-muscular training is capable of that!
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