TECHNICAL ENDURANCE
Definition, conditioning a poor response to fatigue, impact on LCM, & building technical endurance
The moment form breaks under fatigue, the adaptations we trained become irrelevant.
It’s like an Olympic speed skater who lost the edge to their skates. Same athlete. Same engine. No leverage. A peewee hockey player could beat them.
With Long Course champs season here, it’s time to talk about one of the most important and most ignored concepts in swimming:
Technical endurance.
In this article, I’ll define technical endurance, explain why it may be the most overlooked piece of training in the sport, show how we accidentally condition technique regression, and provide a model to build it.
WHAT IS TECHNICAL ENDURANCE
Technical endurance is the ability to sustain the integrity of technique in the face of race-induced fatigue.
Glenn Mills, Wayne Goldsmith, and I cover technical endurance during the GoSwim Coach Ed session on Tuesday, March 23. See video below - all rights reserved.
CONDITIONING A POOR RESPONSE TO FATIGUE
Picture one of your athletes in the weight room. They complete 12 bench press reps at 150 pounds. It’s a new max for that number of reps.
What happens when we add a 25-pound plate to each side?
Less stability. Slower movement. Quicker failure.
Now flip it. What must occur for the athlete to be able to do 100 reps?
They have to drastically reduce the weight.
It’s easy to see this in the weight room, but it’s happening in your pool, too.
Every source of propulsion requires force applied through leverage. When a swimmer executes an effective catch, they are bracing against significant resistance. For the sake of analogy, call it 40 pounds. That is their functional max.
Now ask them to do it 1,200 times through a set of 10 x 200 on a tight interval.
You have seen this swimmer execute a great catch. Today, they are dropping their elbow, and you are frustrated, concerned, and confused.
It looks like a focus issue. When you begin to think about this through the lens of the weight lifter, however, it resembles a load management problem. They cannot hold 1,200 repetitions at their technical max, so the body solves the problem the only way it knows how. It takes weight off the bar.
Dropping the elbow reduces the load, but they sacrifice leverage to do so. Now maybe they can survive the set at 25 pounds instead of 40.
If this fatigue-degrade cycle is repeated and reinforced, this response becomes embedded in the central nervous system.
Compare desired form to practice form. Once you see the gap, you’ll never unsee it.
The same training that is meant to build endurance often reinforces a response to fatigue that renders the conditioning futile in key moments.
IMPACT ON LONG COURSE
I submit to you that Long Course (LCM) is three times as long as Short Course (SCY).
No it’s not. 25 x 2 is 50.
Mathematically, that is accurate. Experientially, though?
A breaststroker who takes 7 strokes in SCY will take roughly 24 strokes in LCM. If you pay attention to your swimmers’ stroke counts, you’ll find that this is true across all strokes.
And this is where it gets spicy.
SCY isn’t killing our LCM performance.
Our lack of technical endurance is doing that.
If your swimmer’s form breaks down within the confines of 25 yards, what is going to happen when they are trapped inside the movement pattern three times longer?
We all understand the impact of removing a turn. But many fail to take into account the skill degradation that we are engraining during LCM practices. Let’s refer back to our breaststroke swimmer. What do strokes 7-24 look like? When the practice is over, how many of those repetitions are reinforcing the desired mechanics and how many of them are reinforcing a performance-limiting response in our central nervous system?
In many cases where coaches value technique, they still separate the technique work from the training. If coaches truly grasped how critical technical endurance is, they would train at the intersection of technique and fitness, where the key moments of the race actually happen.
We can’t punish technique in training, then expect it to show up like superman at the meet. In my opinion, failing to account specifically for technical endurance is the number one reason we struggle in Long Course.
LCM isn’t a bigger hammer to break swimmers down. It’s a mirror that reflects the value of your training through exposing the fate of technique. When you fully grasp this concept, your team will take off in LCM. If we scale this, USA Swimming takes off with it.
BUILDING TECHNICAL ENDURANCE
Think about technical endurance the way we understand immunization.
Introduce fatigue systematically, in doses that ideal technique can defeat. Once technique wins under stress, increase the stress.
In simple terms, we want ideal technique to be sustained in the face of fatigue. That requires conditioning the response to fatigue.
First, define what good form is and measure it.
Using butterfly as an example, great form will take into account an underwater kick count, stroke count, breathing pattern, and predictable splits. If done properly, and repeatedly, the same numbers should continue to show up.
Example:
6 underwater kicks
8 strokes
Breathing on the evens
13 seconds
THE BUTTERFLY GAUNTLET
This is a set that I developed to condition the response to fatigue in FLY. It was inspired by watching Tom Shields at 2013 NCAAs where he takes 7 underwater fly kicks and 5 strokes on repeat en route to his NCAA Championship in 200 FL.
Watch the race. It’s impossible to imagine that those metrics showed up by chance.
The Set:
3 x 25 FL (:30) Cookie Cutter*
1 x 25 Freestyle (:30) Max Effort
3 x 25 Butterfly (:30) Cookie Cutter
*Same underwater kicks, stroke count, breathing pattern, splits, and intensity
The first three 25s establish the baseline.
The freestyle 25 injects stress.
The second three 25s train the response.
The fifth 25 is critical. It is the moment where the swimmer either holds the standard or defaults to breakdown. It is where you plant the seed for the conditioned response.
Click HERE to see how you can build this progressively, like levels in a game.
The dosage increases while the standard remains unchanged.
This becomes powerful when two things happen:
The swimmer progresses through levels, treating the set like an ongoing video game.
They are given weekly opportunities to swim full-stroke butterfly as far as possible without breaking form.
No multiple reps. One attempt. Just like a race.
When form breaks, they stop swimming.
Debrief immediately. Identify where it broke and why.
That is one way the correct response to fatigue can be built.
FINAL THOUGHT
Our training and preparation plans ought to account for more than energy systems lactate buffering, and yardage crunching. Even if you have well-designed technique and physiologically-based training cycles, you still have to the train the athlete at the intersection of technique and fitness. Ultimately, more than anything, we are training the response to fatigue.
Under fatigue, the body defaults to the most efficient way to survive the task, not the most effective way to perform it.