Working With Neural Failure

[Admin Mediterra]

This is perhaps the most important topic of performance oriented training plans is knowing how hard to work, when to push a bit further,  and when to stop.

Failure is a important, positive component of the training process. It needs to be understood as the central component of how you measure progress.

There are different kinds of failure and it is important that you reach a certain kind of failure in each practice set in order to get the full training effect that is intended.

 

Types Of Failure

These are the ways you will measure failure:

1. I cannot maintain attention (soft)
2. I cannot maintain my best precision of movements (soft)
3. I cannot maintain the SPL (between)
4. I cannot maintain the Tempo (between)
5. I cannot achieve the target time (hard)
6. I cannot complete the assigned distance (hard)

Soft Failure

Soft Failure is the kind of failure that is correctable because it relates to some thing you can control – your attention and your conscious instructions to parts of your body. 

When your attention waivers for even a moment while under the high stress of sprint training there will likely be an immediate negative impact on your stroke. This will likely show up as a slight rise in your SPL, a feeling like you can’t catch up with the tempo, or a slight rise in your split time. When you stop at the wall this feedback should catch your attention and make you search for the reason why. Set a new intention for the next repeat to avoid a consecutive failure.

Hard Failure

Hard Failure is the kind you can no longer correct because something in your performance system has been depleted. Even when you renew your attention at the rest, on the next repeat you may not be able to get the precise command to that part of your body and the SPL or time goes up as a consequence.

 

Aim At Neural Failure, Not Muscle Failure

You must stop at this point – called neural failure – because your brain is no longer able to reinforce the patterns you need for swimming a faster, more economical sprint. You may have energy to swim more but you no longer have sufficient motor control –  the sloppy patterns that will be reinforced past this point will compete against the precise patterns that need to eventually dominate. And, if you swim further you will exhaust your muscles at a much deeper level, which increases your risk of injury and requires much more recovery time. Neither of these are helpful to your sprint improvement objective. 

 

When To Go And When To Stop

The soft failures can be fixed in the moment and you must do so – your progress depends on it. And the hard failures you cannot fix because you have simply run out of resources to carry on the work at the assigned standards. 

This is the kind of awareness and honesty you must exercise with yourself during this set. There is no coach to look inside you and challenge your interpretation and push you when you want to give up before your body must. You must quickly assess the failure, be honest about your interpretation and discipline yourself to correct it up to the last of your neural strength – this takes you to the cutting edge of your growth.

The real training begins when you approach that line in each set. It is your persistent work at the line between those two kinds of failure that drives your progress in the training. Each practice you are looking to delay soft failures and delay your first hard failure just a little bit longer into the set that you did before.

This is why there are just a few types of practices and you repeat them over and over – it is the execution of the exact same task that allows you to precisely measure your limits on the previous practices and incremental work your way past them on the following practices.

When you encounter a soft failure you must renew your attention and your intention for the next repeat and keep going.

When you encounter your first hard failure that is a sign you are reaching your neural failure point. When this happens you are permitted to skip the next repeat and rest during that time, then resume immediately.

If you immediately have another hard failure you may stop this set for the day.

If you avoid hard failure the next time, you may keep going until you reach a total of 3 hard failures then stop the set.

 

Measuring Progress

Here is an example of how you may determine progress according to your hard failures…

Day 1

You were assigned 40x 25 and on repeat #19 you encountered your first hard failure. On repeat #24 you encountered your third hard failure and then stopped the set. Your mark is 18 successful repeats.

Day 2

You repeated the same assignment of 40x 25 and this time you made it to #21 where you encountered your first hard failure. On repeat #24 you again encountered your third hard failure and then stopped the set. Your mark is 20 successful repeats.

Day 3

You repeated the same assignment of 40x 25 and this time you made it to #21 where you encountered your first hard failure. On repeat #26 you again encountered your third hard failure and then stopped the set. Your mark is 20 successful repeats, though you showed more neural endurance as you recovered and went further in the set before striking out.

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