The Importance of Shared Workouts

Our professional swimming message board often delivers workouts that coaches share with others. In fact, workout discussions seem to be very popular within the social media community and are found all over Facebook and Instagram pages.

I am always puzzled by these posts for one main reason.  In my interactions with coaches, I always emphasize the fact that the workouts are the last link in the chain of planning decisions and therefore only reflect on the planning decisions made in previous planning step (season, phase, week).  In my view, the workouts and sets can be viewed as specific tools that need to be designed to achieve a specific goal.  In that line of thought, one needs to establish WHAT needs to be achieved BEFORE selecting the means of HOW to achieve that goal.  If we follow this logic, any workout or set disconnected from the purpose is ultimately misleading and useless. Add to this the factor of timing, position in season, and you deal with something absolutely out of the realm of what you as a coach need to do or want to accomplish with your group of swimmers in your specific place in the season.

That is how Super Sport Systems is different from every other training design platform.  We help you optimize your season loads (“how much work we need to execute in each training zone in weekly progression” ) and workouts (“most effective means for achieving maximum training effect in specific zone”)  according to your specific goals so that your swimmers are at their peak exactly when they need to be.   

To achieve this goal, we carefully plan training loads and intensity by zone for each week in the season to support necessary progression.  The truth is, every week should be different by composition of loads and their intensity.  There is no surprise that our new Weekly Load Planner has quickly become one of the most popular and important planning components on our 3S GEN2 platform.   With the help of this tool you can now craft your week by purpose (what kind of work you need to execute and in what volume).  Once your loads are defined, you then define the most effective way to achieve desired effect by selecting the most efficient training sets.  Of course, you are covered with 3S since we offer the optimum solutions at every step, but that does not mean that you cannot step in and make adjustments to match individual needs of every swimmer on your team.

Using these tools athletes trained by 3S consistently attain and surpass their targets  with the confidence that their training design is optimized for their specific goals without having to depend on guesswork or generic workouts that add nothing to their potential performance.