Chapter 9 Training (and How to Get It)

“Fitness is something that happens to you while you’re practicing good technique.”

If the swimmers in my camps go home with little else, I want them to go home remembering that. It’s the cornerstone of the whole Total Immersion program, and though I may sound repetitious with what I’m about to say, it can hardly be overstressed: 70 percent of your swim speed comes from your stroke mechanics and only 30 percent from the muscles, the heart—all the systems that power that stroke. After the second or third time I repeat it at a camp, I can see an excited idea forming in some of the athletes’ eyes. “Wow! This guy tells me I don’t have to be trained to be good! What a time saver!”

Alas, that’s not what I meant. We’re adjusting priorities, not advocating sloth. In the first place, 30 percent is nothing to walk away from. More important, however, even a brilliantly efficient stroke won’t do you much good if you run out of gas halfway down the pool. Training does have its place in the Total Immersion system, and the more you know about what the training effect is, the better you’ll know how to plan your own.

My definition is simple: The training effect can be summed up as the feeling of nearly limitless capacity to exercise, take deep, satisfying breaths, feel fresh throughout a workout, and go on practically forever. It’s really the opposite of aging—asking ourselves (and our cells) to do more rather than less. That’s why I didn’t savor it fully until I’d begun to experience aging first. See if what happened to me sounds familiar.

I was in the best shape of my life during four years of college swimming. Rigorous daily two-hour workouts gave me the ability to tirelessly swim mile after hard mile. I had energy to burn for anything I wanted to do. But you’re supposed to feel that way when you’re twenty years old.

That must have been why I gave it up so casually, retiring from competitive swimming before I’d even turned twenty-one. Masters swimming wasn’t an option back then, and without races to train for, what was the point in working out?

Sixteen sedentary years followed. The lean and hard undergraduate’s body softened into the daddy-and-breadwinner’s flabby frame, easily winded from just raking leaves. I wasn’t happy about it, but I’d grown comfortable with my undemanding lifestyle.

Soon after my thirty-seventh birthday, the wake-up call came. Reaching into the backseat of my car for a light package, I couldn’t straighten up again. Three days later, able to get out of bed for the first time, I promised myself I would return to regular swim training.

Predictably, the first months were difficult and discouraging as I struggled to overcome the accumulated effects of neglect on my muscles, heart, and lungs. A hard, four-mile training session had been a cakewalk in college. Now, I could barely struggle through one mile. But I kept at it, swimming the short, brisk lengths of intervals instead of just plowing up and down in nonstop marathon workouts, until it got easier and I could go farther.

Day by day, week by week, for the next several years, my capacity grew. In year two I could knock off 3000-yard practices as easily as the 2000-yard workouts of the year before. By the third, I had deftly upped it to 4000 yards and in the fourth, as I trained for a 5000-meter (3.1-mile) event at the World Masters Championships, I could sail through sessions of 5000 yards and more without even breathing hard. Best of all, as I turned forty, I felt much younger than I had ten years earlier.

So, besides an elixir for turning back the clock, what is the training effect? Building strength through stress. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche might have been thinking of the benefits we get from our workouts when he declared, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” Stress an organism and it breaks down a little, then builds itself up slightly better than before. Give a muscle a heavier weight to lift than it’s used to and it has to work harder. Ouch. Put it on a regular program of such work, however, and it builds itself up so it can meet that new demand easily—as long as it gets enough rest between workouts to repair and strengthen itself. It’s a ratcheting process: one step back, rest, two steps forward.

The starting point for training is not the mirror, as some people looking for “good bodies” mistakenly believe, but the heart—a muscle we can develop just like any other. The amount of work your heart can do is called cardiac output—the volume of blood it can circulate in a given period of time. The goal of training is to increase cardiac output, which determines how much work your muscles can do.

Cardiac output is the product of heart rate (pulse, or beats per minute [BPM]) multiplied by stroke volume (the amount of blood it can pump with each beat). Stress the heart regularly through exercise and it will grow bigger and stronger just as other muscles do. This increases stroke volume. As your heart gets better able to pump more blood with each contraction, it takes fewer contractions to do the job. So as your training takes hold, you can either do the same work (like swimming a mile) at the same speed more easily (you feel better), or you can work just as hard as you used to but go faster (you do better). The same effort that once produced a 40-minute mile may now drive you through the mile in 35 minutes. That’s the choice most people make.

The other muscles, of course, also respond to training. They learn how to better extract oxygen from the blood to fuel themselves and flush out waste products, and they may increase their size.

The heart gets its training from most any workout. But most of the blood it circulates goes to the skeletal muscles doing the actual work of moving the body around the track or down the pool. Since swimming uses different muscle groups from running, for example, swim training builds you differently from running. And you can’t get around that by just pouring more work on, as I’m reminded every year. If I’ve spent all winter prepping ambitiously for a springtime Regional or National Masters championship, by April I’ll be in prime shape for swimming three miles of brisk interval repeats—the equivalent of twelve running miles. Won’t even break a sweat. But on my first spring run about the same time, I’m shot after three easy miles. Plenty of cardiac output; however, the running muscles have lost the ability to use it well. But if I persevere through that discouraging phase, within weeks I’ll begin to feel stronger—much more quickly than if my cardiovascular system wasn’t already in “swimming shape.”

That’s the value of cross-training.

That’s also a lesson in specificity. For example, don’t train your cycling muscles to become a better swimmer. In fact, as I mentioned in an earlier chapter, specificity goes even deeper than just narrowing most of your training to the sport you want to excel at. You even use specialized muscle groups at different times within that single sport, such as when you swim different strokes. If I train with freestyle sets, then race breaststroke with all I’ve got, I can count on my muscles starting to shut down midway through the event. The breaststroke muscles aren’t in racing shape. As much swimming as I’ve done, they haven’t been specifically trained.

And finally, even if you train exactly the right muscles every single time, they respond differently to different workout intensities. There’s aerobic (with oxygen) training, where the muscles burn fuel to produce energy and can go on doing that for a long time. And there’s anaerobic (without oxygen) training, which is more intense, relies on a kind of stored muscle fuel that doesn’t require oxygen but that’s always in limited supply, and makes you tired quickly.

Aerobic and anaerobic fitness are not only powered by different energy sources, they are used at different times. The aerobic source provides energy at moderate rates, but for a long time, as we said. This promotes endurance. The anaerobic source provides energy faster, perfect for bursts of speed, but the well goes dry quickly. It’s like having two fuel tanks, one with a huge valve and one with a tiny one. The huge valve will power an equally huge eight-cylinder engine—but not for long. The tank empties quickly. The small valve may run only a meager four-cylinder engine but will keep it going all day long.

If you like to swim fast, and especially if you race, the training challenge is to make sure the anaerobic fuel tank is topped off. You could swim 10,000 aerobic yards a day and still have little but fumes in that other tank. The only way to fill it is anaerobic training.

Easy to say, not so easy to do. Anaerobic hurts! And the more anaerobic your training is, the more your lungs burn, your chest pounds, and your muscles throb. That’s why it’s so easy to put off over and over again. But if you want to race—as opposed to just get in shape—you can’t make it purely on aerobic fitness.

The shorter the race, the more anaerobic it will be. In a race of 50 yards, which might take between 30 and 40 seconds, about 90 percent of your energy comes from the anaerobic fuel tank. But in the mile race, which usually takes between 20 and 30 minutes, more than 90 percent of the energy will come from your aerobic tank.

Conveniently, the way you should train for each event is much the same as the way you race it. Endurance training (longer sets, shorter rest, easier pace) develops the “wind” tank. Sprint training (shorter sets, longer rest, faster pace) develops the “speed” tank by making you swim fast enough and hard enough so your muscles scream for more oxygen. If they have to scream often enough, they eventually learn to extract more oxygen from the blood.

That’s called higher maximal oxygen uptake (the VO_2max of seasoned athlete’s lingo), but it’s not the only way to skin the aerobic/anaerobic speed cat. The other way is—no surprise to you by now, I’m sure—a better stroke. Since 70 percent of your swim speed comes from your stroke, as I obviously never tire of saying, great stroke mechanics let you reach much higher speeds without doing much more work or using more fuel. Swim economically, minimizing drag with a sleek and balanced body, and you’ll automatically be able to go faster before crossing the dreaded anaerobic threshold.

Still, what happens if you train one way and race another? Aren’t the two really close enough to give decent results? No, they’re not. I learned that myself the hard way.

In 1992, getting ready for the 5-kilometer (3.1-mile) race in the Masters World Championships, I logically used long sets on very short rest for my training. After all, a race lasting over an hour would probably draw maybe a percent or two of its energy from the anaerobic system. Why bother training it?

But I was getting antsy to do something with all this conditioning. So, long before the big race, I entered a local Masters meet. The 100-yard freestyle was my first event, and I mounted the block confident that since my high-volume/short-rest training sessions had me in the best shape since college, this would be a very good day.

At first, it was. At the start I dove in and swam strongly through the first 50 yards. But as I came off that second turn, something was wrong. I couldn’t possibly be tired! Already?

Oh yes, I could. By the time I came to the 75-yard turn, my muscles were tying up into knots and I felt as if I were wearing an overcoat instead of my Speedo. My struggle to finish that brief race gave me plenty of reason to reflect on how nice it would have been to have done at least a little speed training. I may have been in fantastic aerobic shape, but the anaerobic tank was long dry.