Practice Set for Training with Tempo

In this lesson series we are going to get acquainted with the three basic ways of using tempo constraint in your first stages of advanced skills training.

Practice Set for Attention

You will use the BEEP to draw your attention to a particular part of the body at a particular moment in the stroke cycle.

For example, you can choose to coordinate the BEEP with the entry, or the catch, or the rotation, or the press of the leg.

Set the Tempo Trainer Pro to your current comfortable tempo TC.

Swim 4x 25 (one length) for each of parts of the stroke mentioned above.

Practice Set for Slow Control

You will practice swimming at a slightly uncomfortably slow tempo. This will create a good challenge for your ability to maintain balance, stability and streamline. Read a bit more in Why Practice at Really Slow Tempos?

Start at your current comfortable tempo TC and swim 2x 25. Then slow down the tempo by +0.05 seconds and swim another 2x 25. Count strokes while you do this and for a while, as you slow tempo down, you should find that you take fewer strokes to get across the pool. When you slow down the tempo farther but your stroke count no longer goes down in response to it, then that is a sign that you’ve reached the limits of your ability to squeeze more travel out of extra time between strokes.

Spend some time working at that slowest tempo where you can just barely hold your lowest stroke count and maintain control over your balance, stability and streamline. You may find that your brain starts to adapt and it gets a little easier (before you get too tired).

Note: swimming with tempos slower than 1.80 seconds per stroke is an extremely slow tempo. It would be remarkable if one can swim much slower than this and continue to lower their stroke count, but it might be possible…

Practice Set for Fast Control

You will practice swimming at a slightly uncomfortably fast tempo. This will create a good challenge for your ability to maintain precision and timing of your movements. Read a bit more in Why Practice at Really Fast Tempos?

Start at your current comfortable tempo TC and swim 2x 25. Then slow down the tempo by -0.03 seconds and swim another 2x 25. At this stage in your training we won’t require you to count strokes – that will come in later stages – but as you speed up the tempo, at some point you will notice that you feel too rushed in your movements, and you are losing control over your body position, your shape, or the precision or coordination of moving parts. This is a sign that you’ve reached the limits of your ability at this time.

Spend some time working at that fastest tempo where you can just barely hold precision, timing and coordination of moving parts. You may find that your brain starts to adapt and it gets a little easier (before you get too tired).