!st of let me preface everything I’m about to say with the fact that I’m not a sports scientist or a physiologist so my understanding is very basic.
The hope is that this will be the first post in a short series on how/why we train the way we do and my thinking behind some of the ways we go about stuff.
Why do we train?
As coaches our job is, basically, to put our athletes in the starting block at the designated meets in the best possible condition to produce a performance. A lot on things go into this from a physical and psychological perspective as well as the environmental factors that can impact on performance.
What is performance?
Performance is the ability to avoid disturbance to the homeostasis.
(Homeostasis is defined as the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes)
Our body is trying to regulate homeostasis, when that fails, fatigue is the result.
Performance can be defined as the delaying of fatigue.
Fatigue is the lose of the ability to sustain a given work output.
No matter what that work output is, a 1500 FS or a 50 FS, at some point the body says “no more” – This is fatigue.
The purpose of training program is to our athletes on the blocks with enough under their belts to allow them t delay fatigue for the duration or their race.
Fatigue
Fatigue depends on a lot of factors under which you are performing. It could be running out of glycogen (hitting the wall) when there simply isnt enough energy to sustain effort. Realistically this is unlikley to be the case in a swimming race.
More likely there will be a metabolic change within the muscle, pH drops, ATP declines, lactate levels go up, calcium and potassium levels change.
Ultimately the rate at which you can give you muscles the energy they need isn’t sufficient to meet the demand.
Eventually our brain simply fails to activate the muscle.
There are two types of fatigue, and its really a spectrum never completely one or the other.
Central Fatigue – brain cant\wont send signals to the muscles anymore
Peripheral Fatigue – There is a problem at the muscle level . This type of fatigue is much more likely the higher the intensity of the exercise being performed
Simple economics – Supply v Demand
As we train, we increase the demand on the body for energy, as we demand more energy, our body adapts to that demand and builds more mitochondria to help meet this demand.
Mitochondria are known as the powerhouses of the cell. They are organelles that act like a digestive system which takes in nutrients, breaks them down, and creates energy rich molecules for the cell. The biochemical processes of the cell are known as cellular respiration.
Mitochondria produce energy via the oxidative system. with training our body builds more mitochondria and therefore the ability to produce more ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) which are energy-carrying molecules found in the cells of all living things.
ATP is the currency our body uses for energy supply.
Energy sources.
Our body gets its energy from nutrients, for now we will deal with Carbohydrates and Fats.
Carbs (glycogen) is stored in two places, the liver and the muscels
Fats are also stored in two places, the muscles and adipose tissue.
We convert the nutrients into ATP via two systems, the oxidative and the glycolytic, or non oxidative.
Our body uses the non oxidative energy source when it needs to get energy quickly, but it is a short term solution the the energy problem. This short term fix may be great for a 50 FS but for a 200 or 400 we may have an issue.
So why train?
When we train our AEC (Aerobic Capacities), we are trying to build as many mitochondria as possible so that we delay the point at which our body switches to the non oxidative source and push back the point of failure through fatigue and therefore improve performance.
We use polar OH1 heart rate monitors and tempo trainers to track intensity. they can found through the link below
Confessions of a Swim Coach 