Watch How Michael Andrew Trains USRPT With Team USA Coaches

After teasing it in his last video, Michael Andrew runs his fans through a workout with members of the team USA coaching staff, which doesn’t include his dad, Peter Andrew. Because Andrew’s training style is so drastically different than most of the team, this has been a big question for fans (and, those who are not so much fans) as it looked more-and-more likely this summer that Andrew would make the team.

He’s been on several junior travel teams before, where his dad wasn’t on the coaching staff, but now on the senior team, the question has come into focus.

To start the interview, Andrew talks with University of Texas men’s assistant Wyatt Collins and Indiana (and Pan Pac men’s team) head coach Ray Looze. Collins described it as a learning curve for him, but said that he was eager about the opportunity to pick up a new training style. Looze related and emphasized a point that MA made in his last video, that drew some sneers from the commenters, about how to time him. Specifically – because of the precision required by pure USRPT training, the coaches had to make sure they were timing Michael the same way that his dad did, which means starting the watch not on ‘go,’ but on when the feet leave the wall.

Looze and Chase Kreitler were the recipients of the USRPT tutorial from Peter Andrew, and were responsible for disseminating that to the rest of the staff.

He trained USRPT sets of the 100 breast and 100 fly. On the breaststroke set, he was consistently holding 12.0s, which was under his goal time of 12.5s; on his fly he has holding 11.0s and 10.9s, with the goal time of 11.2s; and then he decided to cut the 100 back from his training session as an ‘off’ event, and instead trained ‘overspeed’ 25s to work for his 50 free.

The next morning, Andrew trained with Florida post-grad coach Gregg Troy. Troy, who has a reputation for grueling high-yardage set, says that he’s been doing USRPT for years (since the 70s), just not as often as Michael does it. He refers to it as “part of the mosaic,” which has been a theme painted by many of America’s veteran coaches, using different metaphors (including “tools in the toolbox.”)

Troy said what he likes about USRPT is that it’s repetition ‘correctly,’ and said that he finds value in repetition either with the correct speed (as in USRPT) or form.

Andrew finishes the video with a thank you to the coaches and a cameo from his Tokyo roommate Zane Grothe (who is a vlogging veteran since he’s in a post-grad training group with vlogger extraordinaire Cody Miller).

Video is Below: