Throwing up in the huddle...
Timing is everything. Finding a date for Friday night, getting a free sandwich, networking with potential colleagues – many opportunities in daily life can be attributed to time and space. One of the most famous football leaders of all time, Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday, may have put the coaches’ perspective on timing the best: “Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small. I mean one-half step too late, or too early, you don't quite make it. One-half second too slow or too fast and you don't quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They are in every break of the game, every minute, every second.” Okay, so maybe Al read some great lines amidst smooth background music, LL Cool J getting amped, and flashy cinematography, but the half second too slow or too fast resonates with me. 
To take a more scientific approach, consider timing in skill acquisition: the muscles fire at the right time and fire in the right order, this stimulates the correct number of muscle fibers, which in turn leads to athletic success. The Talent Code author, Daniel Coyle, talks about building superhighways of myelin-sheathed neural pathways in the skill acquisition process to lead to athletic superiority. If you take enough golf swings in a highly concentrated practice, and the timing of your swing becomes impeccable due to the myelin sheath around that particular neural pathway, you too could become the next Tiger Woods, in theory anyway.
What does all of this mean in terms of swimming? As swim coaches, we have some options in creating and building race ready strokes for our swimmers. On account of the cyclical nature of our sport, one of the most impactful ways to refine your swimmers’ stroke is to examine their stroke rate. Tempo (balanced with distance per stroke) is a crucial determinate in an elite stroke; you can develop athletes to swim at an individually correct rate. This is where the tempo trainer, a well-used tool at the Carmel Swim Club, comes into play. I defer to G. John Mullen on the science of what timing a beep to a stroke does to the body and brain, but to my observant eye, I see a remarkable difference in concentration when an athlete puts a tempo trainer in their cap. The tempo trainer objectively holds each swimmer accountable to a time or rate and as such is extremely effective. The beauty is, instead of the coach constantly droning, “go faster!” your swimmer is motivated to hit a pace or tempo more intrinsically – or at least by the beep in their head.
While you can use the tempo trainer in a multitude of ways, we use them most often at Carmel Swim Club in the following four modes:
- Race Pace Tempo Training
- Race Pace Time Training
- Kick Tempo Training (Dolphin Kick and Breaststroke Kick)
- Swimming with Intent
Many of you have seen the chart that was originally inserted with the Finis tempo trainers that lists a single cycle and three stroke cycle tempo minimum, maximum, and average for each event and each gender. We utilize a version of this chart that our assistant coach, Maggie Moss, generated while she was coaching at Indiana University from 2007-2008. Maggie updated the chart by looking at the top-20 all-time performances in each event on the USA Swimming website. The race analysis data offered for each event provides the minimum (fastest), average, and maximum (slowest) tempo within each performance. Maggie took that data from each of those performances and averaged each minimum, average, and maximum for a single cycle count and for cycles per minute. The results are distributed on the chart here:
While we realize these tempos are not necessarily going to be a perfect fit for our swimmers, this chart gives us a guideline for what to work towards. After all, if we want to develop elite swimmers, it is important to expose our swimmers to what the best of the best are doing. We encourage our swimmers to start with the average tempo for their event on the chart, and then we work with them to adjust the tempo up or down depending on how their stroke looks. At Carmel, one of our favorite ways to work this is in short bursts of about 15 meters or in a set number of stroke cycles during a longer distance. For example, we do a set long course (usually in preparation for blue sets) where swimmers do four to six 100s. During each 100, swimmers must pick 15 meters anywhere within the 100 to hit race pace tempo.
Race Pace Time Training
We call this type of training, “Beat the Beep” at Carmel. We look at a swimmer’s goal time in an event and set the tempo trainer to half the time it takes for a swimmer to swim 25 yards or one-fourth of the time it takes to swim 50 meters at the indicated pace. Here is an example: Say a swimmer wants to go 50.0 in a 100 yard event, or 12.5 seconds per 25. Half of 12.5 in 6.25, and thus you set the tempo trainer to that time. The swimmer knows the tempo trainer will beep every 6.25 seconds, so, right before a beep, the swimmer goes underwater in order to push off the wall precisely on a beep. Their goal is to “beat the beep” for the designated distance. If we are doing a set of 25s in this exercise, a swimmer will have to reach the 12.5 by the second beep (counting the beep when they depart the wall as the first) and then reach the 25 by the third beep. The pattern continues for whichever distance we choose to pace that day. To make sure we are effectively measuring pace, we have our swimmers go to their feet. “Beat the Beep” does not necessarily have to be for race pace training, but can be used for any kind of training in practice where having your swimmers hit a certain time is the goal.
Kick Temp Training
Want to speed up or slow down a dolphin kicker? Put a tempo trainer in their cap. I believe the tempo trainer is effective for dolphin kick as it often informs swimmers that they are not kicking nearly fast enough (or as fast as they think they are kicking). One tradeoff of manipulating a swimmer’s dolphin kick may be a decrease in the size of the kick. It is therefore essential that the coach and athlete work together to ensure that the kick’s amplitude remains appropriate for each swimmer. We also find the tempo trainer useful in breaststroke kicking. The device helps hold the swimmer accountable to maintaining a proper tempo for practice. Again, you can play with the rate and adjust accordingly through a set, but it is important to keep a close eye on how the swimmer maintains the size of their kick.
Swim with Intent
I find one of the biggest challenges of being a swim coach to be getting swimmers to transfer great looking moderate swimming into race-hardened technique. The tempo trainer is useful to bridge great technique with race appropriate speeds. Use the tempo trainer to gradually transition moderate swimming into race pace swimming. It’s interesting to watch the swimmers manipulate their strokes and listen to them discuss where breakdowns are occurring as the rate increases. I recommend doing 25’s in groups of four or six and gradually increasing the rate until the preferred technique breaks down.
Wrap-up
Hopefully the information and suggested uses for the tempo trainers offered here helps get you thinking about how tempo work and different pace exercises can work within your program. The most important thing I’ve learned after working with these tools over the years is that they offer a guideline of where to begin with tempo. Work closely with your swimmers to figure out what works best with them. Encourage them to play with it, let them have fun and take ownership in communicating what happens to their stroke at different paces and tempos. Timing is everything, of course, but each swimmer has their own timing that works the best for them.
By Chris Plumb. He is the head coach of Carmel Swim Club in Carmel, Indiana. As Carmel high school head coach Chris has coached the team for the last 5 of their 25 consecutive women and 2 of the boys last 13 state titles.
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