Automated Critical Swim Speed (CSS) enables new enhanced testing protocols without specific test sets or lactate testing.
Critical Swim Speed (CSS) itself is not a new concept. There are established calculations both to determine a swimmer's Critical Swim Speed and by extension their training zone activity.
What may be new to you is the idea of using CSS as a standard testing protocol to measure performance improvements at scale (it's more popular in certain geographies than others).
Typically tracking performance improvements has been a tedious exercise. Either in running and documenting the times for the same gruelling test sets throughout the season or dealing with complicated, expensive lactate testing. Not having to run specific test sets to establish CSS, or do the training zone calculations yourself is a dream come true for most coaches, so let's explore how to do this.
- Pull up the team the swimmer is associated with
- From Home, switch the toggle to Team and use the dropdown to select the desired team, or tap the Teams icon
on the left sidebar and select the team card.
- From Home, switch the toggle to Team and use the dropdown to select the desired team, or tap the Teams icon
- Tap Members in the mid-upper right of the screen and select the member type your desired user is listed under
- Select the desired athlete
- Once their activity feed loads, select Intensity from any activity card
- On Intensity, tap on the Energy Score button
- Scroll down to the "Time in training zone" section and tap on the 'See my zones' button.
This will open a pop-up with the pace per 100m/yd value at the top of each training zone for that particular workout for each stroke type (Fly, Back, Breast and Free). Viewing this pop-up from different workouts will display the zone values as of that workout, so viewing different workouts will reveal how much the values are improving over time.
This is effectively the same as recording test sets, with or without lactate, but without all of the headache!