How Training Strategy and training targets pricision Shapes Swimmer Performance
latest data after the first 3S GEN2 Cascade cycle
At mid-season, all interviewed 3S-powered programs posted massive number of lifetime bests — without traditional tapering and high-intensity training.
Here’s exactly how the 3S GEN2 Cascade Season Strategy made it happen.
▶︎ “53 season bests & 25 lifetime bests — halfway through season.” — EMU
▶︎ “75 lifetime bests & 3 school records.” — Indiana State University
▶︎ “20 personal bests & 46 season bests.” – Duquesne University… fine more below
🏊♂️ Why Are Swimmers Breaking Records Before Speed Training Begins?
Designing an effective training season has never been simple or easy. This is especially true for collegiate coaches, where training seasons affected by academic pressures, holidays, mid-season meets, and multiple championship targets that demand not only sound physiology, but mostly strategic efficiency.
Since launching our training design services in 2002, Super Sport Systems (3S) has worked closely with collegiate swimming programs facing exactly these constraints. From the very beginning, one question stood out:
How can coaches build high-level preparedness early—without compromising peak performance at the main championship meets?
The answer emerged through the application of the Parametric Training principles and their further integration with yet another critical component of the Ergometric Training Concept – the Weekly Loads Density planner. In short, the practical implementation of the theoretical findings allowed 3S to reshape and weaponize the contemporary periodization.
🧠 Why the Cascade Strategy Matters
Parametric Training allows training cycles to be structured according to precise rules governing individual and sequential adaptation progression and recovery. Different training goals require different strategies. However, under specific conditions, such as typical collegiate season, these foundational strategies can be separated and applied in sequential manner, placing main focus of the first cascade cycle on building capacities—most notably aerobic capacity—before shifting emphasis toward anaerobic power and race-specific intensity.
For collegiate swimming, this opened the door to a powerful idea:
combine multiple capacity-focused cycles before entering the high-cost (and risky) anaerobic phase.
This approach became known as the Cascade Planning Strategy.
By the mid-2000s, it was clear that cascade planning was uniquely suited to collegiate seasons. It allowed coaches to:
- Exploit longer early-season windows
- Build deeper aerobic and “special preparedness” foundations
- Delay the physiological and psychological cost of high-intensity specialization
By 2006, nearly 100% of collegiate programs using 3S had adopted the cascade approach in their preparations for Conference and NCAA Championships.
What We Expected—and What Actually Happened
Under classic cascade planning, the goal of the first training phase is not immediate speed. The emphasis is aerobic capacity and robustness, stopping before a full transition into anaerobic power concentration or tapering.
Using our earlier GEN1 platform, this approach consistently delivered strong end-of-season results. However, GEN1 lacked a dedicated cascade planner. While the strategy in general was sound, execution relied heavily on manual control, limiting precision and individualization
As a result, expectations were conservative:
- After the first cascade cycle, swimmers typically matched previous best performances
- Extraordinary mid-season breakthroughs were not anticipated
Enter 3S GEN2: Precision Changes Everything
The 3S GEN2 platform was developed using more than two decades of coach feedback. One of its highest priorities was a dedicated Cycle Planner, including full cascade planning functionality. More so, this component was reinforced by a new 3S feature – Weekly Density Planner, the first planner of such kind in the industry.
By introducing this combination, we expected GEN2 to improve clarity and planning efficiency.
What we did not expect was a fundamental shift in when performance began to emerge, or, in other words, the timing of individual athletes’ reactions to these combination.
The 2025–2026 season marked the largest representation of collegiate swimming programs on the GEN2 platform to date. As mid-season meets concluded, a new pattern became impossible to ignore:
Athletes were swimming fast—much earlier than anticipated—despite minimal emphasis on high-intensity race work.
📊 What Coaches Are Reporting
53 season bests & 25 lifetime bests — halfway through the season
Coach Derek Perkins, Eastern Michigan University
75 lifetime bests · 3 school records · 36 CSCAA standards — by December
Coach Joshua Christensen, Indiana State University
20 PBs & 46 season bests (61% of roster)
Coach David Sheets, Duquesne University
Nearly entire roster performing at 97.5–100% of benchmarks mid-season
Coach Rickey Perkins, University of Sioux Falls
Want to get similar results?
🧬Physiological Evidence Supports the Results
Performance data, while looking impressive, still could be subjective. However, the physiological testing reinforced what we were seeing in competition.
Coaches at the University of Georgia reported:
“The UGA Women’s swim team showed the best body composition changes of all UGA athletic programs over the 2.5-month testing interval.”
This aligns closely with long-term physiological data reported by other coaches in the past and collected from 3S athletes across sports.
🚣 A Cross-Sport Validation: Rowing
The same ergometric principles underpinning 3S swimming programs apply beyond the pool.
Master rower Greg Benning—a 3S user since 2006—won the 50+ category at the 2025 Head of the Charles Regatta at age 63, extending an extraordinary career that includes:
- 28 consecutive Head of the Charles victories
- 14 Silver Skiff Regatta titles (Turin, Italy)
These performance made Greg a living legend in the rowing community, an absolute long-term performance record in the Worlds rowing history.
Earlier official laboratory testing revealed that after using 3S training protocols and structured 3S cycles:
- His anaerobic threshold increased from 80% to 90% of HRmax
- Year-to-year speed improvement in 24 weeks (2 cascade cycles): 2% – at the age of 46.
- Lab feedback: “Keep doing whatever you’re doing—because it’s clearly working.”
This consistency across sports reinforces a key point:
the 3S model is robust, not event-specific.
🧩 What This Means for Coaches
The results forced us to ask an uncomfortable—but important—question:
Do swimmers really need to swim fast all the time in practice, especially early-on in season, to perform well?
The GEN2 data suggests otherwise.
Despite minimal emphasis on sprint or race-pace training, athletes emerged from the first cascade phase:
- Fitter
- More resilient
- Closer to peak performance than ever before at this stage of the season
This early performance expression appears to be a by-product of precision in reaching and improving key elements of “preparedness structure”, not premature peaking.
🧪 Looking Ahead: The Second Cascade Cycle
A common concern among 3S experts and contributors is whether early speed might “use up” adaptive reserves and limit improvement later in the season.
Based on coach feedback and accumulated data, confidence is high:
- Athletes are entering the second cycle better prepared for high-intensity work
- Aerobic capacity development creates a stronger platform for anaerobic power expression
- Adaptation potential remains intact
Historically, 3S programs show 1.5–2% improvement over previous best performances within 16–24 weeks, exceeding typical Division I seasonal progressions—and these gains are repeatable year after year.
Final Takeaway
The 3S GEN2 platform did not change its original training philosophy.
It changed the resolution and precision at which that philosophy is executed.
By combining:
- Ergometric modeling
- Parametric rules
- Dedicated cascade planning tools
- Dedicated and Smart Weekly Density Distribution
- Coordinated and universal approach to Energy Zones and their dynamics in season
GEN2 enables coaches to build seasons that are not only effective—but predictable, efficient, and adaptable.
While early fast performances after the first cascade cycle came as a bit of a surprise, we believe that they are no longer a risk, unlike fast swims based on high-intensity training.
These results can be viewed as a sign that 3S training principles are working—exactly as designed.
