Coach’s Intel: Osvath’s Pace Buckets Set Pre-1:53 Breaststroke

Some cool insight into our Swim of the Week: after we recognized Missouri State’s Artur Osvath for his school-record 200 breast, Missouri State associate head coach Chelsea Dirks-Ham reached out with a specific set he used in his preparation that week.

A big thanks to Dirks-Ham and the Missouri State program for sharing this bit of coaching intel. The set pairs some “buckets” (resistance-based swimming attached to a bucket of weight, sometimes known as “Power Towers” or “Pulleys”) with 50s at 200 pace. You can see it below in Dirks-Ham’s tweet, or reproduced below that:

4 rounds:

2 x 15-meter breaststroke kick with board, attached to the bucket
2 x breaststroke pullout plus 4 strong stroke cycles, attached to the bucket
1 x 50 breaststroke at 200 pace from a push
1 x 50 easy

Dirks-Ham also kept track of Osvath’s times and stroke counts on the pace portion of the set: he roughly held 28-mid-to-lows (between 28.1 and 28.6), taking 4 strokes on the opening 25 and either 4 or 5 strokes on the second 25. Top-tier 200 breaststrokers really seem to excel with low stroke counts, and sure enough, Osvath’s stroke counts during his 1:53 race three days later were 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 6. His pace 50s most closely mirrored the second 50 of his 200, which was 28.6. The final two 50s were 29.3 and 30.0.

While not every coach will have access to buckets (or the ability to run a set like this with a larger group), the effect could be roughly replicated with parachutes, stretch cords or even a drag suit.

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Tea rex
5 years ago

This is great. I was a short-axis swimmer (fly), and resistance was one of the most effective training tools I used. In short axis, every stroke you accelerate quickly with the stroke/kick, and decelerate on the recovery. When something is constantly pulling you back, you REALLY feel the deceleration and maybe even start moving backwards during that time. That helped my body learn the best muscle memory, positioning, and tempo to minimize that deceleration.

Through the course of a season, I started with 20 x 15 yards (that’s how long the tower’s cord was) @ 30 seconds, and worked down to 8 x 15 yards @ 60 seconds. All out – taking as many kicks as in a real… Read more »

Buddy
5 years ago

I wonder how different his time would be if he didn’t do 4 dolphin kicks off each wall haha!

About Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson swam for nearly twenty years. Then, Jared Anderson stopped swimming and started writing about swimming. He's not sick of swimming yet. Swimming might be sick of him, though. Jared was a YMCA and high school swimmer in northern Minnesota, and spent his college years swimming breaststroke and occasionally pretending …

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