PART 1
BRANT BEST, 39, NSWIS elite swimming coach, is best known for having coached James Magnussen to win the 100m freestyle gold medal and set up victory over the USA in the 4x100 Freestyle Relay at the FINA world swimming championships in Shanghai, China in 2011.
Magnussen clocked 47.6sec which is the fastest time ever swum in a textile swimsuit. Virtually unknown coming into the championships, Magnussen became the first Australian to win the blue riband event at the world titles and the first to win at a major since Michael Wenden in the 1968 Mexico Olympic Games. Magnussen’s coach explains how they did it.
By Mike Hurst
MH: You said you knew James Magnussen had it in him to win the world title. On what basis did you form that view? The quality of his sets in training?
BB: Yes. He’d made enough of a leap forward. I knew what product of training and in our key points that it took to go 48.2sec which is what he did at Trials and before that when he went 48.9. Certain components were adding up to that speed (47.6). The speed he was doing in training was faster than he’d done at Trials.
MH: What do you put that down to? What kind of training processes?
BB: He was technically better. His physio was better. We worked with a physio who is very good and who invested in the team. Dave Pugh at Drummoyne would go out of his way. He’s very good and also very devoted to our squad. He would take it upon his own back to say ‘I want to have a look at this in the water.’ He would look at how we could find some exercises and bash him around a bit in order to get him into the correct type of movement. That enabled me to make some technique changes with him that he wasn’t previously able to make because he wasn’t holding together in the right way. His shape has changed a lot.
MH: So form follows function. You improved the function of the joints and the muscle function as well.
BB: Absolutely.
MH: A couple of weeks out from the world championships you were confronted by every coach’s worst nightmare: illness. This is not a head cold. This is pneumonia. You’ve come through that, obviously with fantastic medical intervention from the Aussie team staff. But he comes up, swims a virtual world record – it was the fastest ever in a textile suit. What do you learn from the fact that he’s had nine days out of the pool? That’s unheard of.
BB: Yes it is. The big issue for me was whether he was going to keep his ‘feel’ for the water. He’s a ‘feely’ kind of athlete. The first thing was , I knew the work we’d done. He had just come off Adelaide where he swam his first real 200m. He had never raced a 200m and at that stage we had not done a lot of work towards the 200m. But he came out and won the Australian shortcourse title. He wasn’t even seeded in the top 30 going into the meet. He had to swim from the slowest heat to get into the final.
So, I knew he had the background. I knew he had the technique. If he was rested I knew he could swim fast. Then it was all about keeping his head together. I just assured him, OK, we’re in taper. You’re going to be resting anyway. You may as well be resting like that. And then we justr got back on the basics as though we’d never left it. I had to find my compass again. It was like someone had picked up my compass and thrown it in the bushes. We had done a few tapers so I know where he is at each point. But (in this instance) I had to coach a lot more than just follow a plan. I had to work out where he was on the watch, how much he could handle without burying him because if I gave him too much I’d make it worse. So keeping his head together was the main thing. Knowing that he had to maintain world class freestyling. He had no buffer to stuff up the race. He had to swim the race well.
He couldn’t muscle up the race and win it. When he tries to muscle it anyway he doesn’t do so well. It was about some good quality freestyle all the time. You can’t afford to swim poorly. You can’t afford to be an Alpha male and bash the shit out of it. “
MH: You’re calling for speed without effort. Take some of the tension out of it and get rewarded with the elastic response.
BB: Exactly right.
MH: Your program structure. Would you describe it as long-to-short, short-to-long or concurrent?
BB: Across the whole macro-cycle? Ooh. That’s a good question. For James we start off with some short stuff, we go into some long, we come out and do some short.
MH: You’re cycling through the work.
BB: Yup. We come up and down, depending also on (the siting of) competitions. But I’ll progressively load on top of a fairly simple base of finding speed early and then progressively load and bring intervals down within that time (cycle). Once he’s found his speed, make things a little bit tougher, let him find his speed (again) and then interfere with that a little bit more. I’ll let him find his race speed again and then we’ll interfere with that again. We’ll just go through the cycles and I’ll just load, and load and load as much as I can on top of the speed that he’s already got established to get to where he wants to get to.
MH: Brant, how long would the cycle last?
BB: I run four weeks at a cycle.
MH: Do you unload before you load him up again?
BB: Yes, yep. It depends on what sought of cycle we’re in. If we’re in a longer, more aerobic cycle with three-and-a-half weeks on and a half-week off. If it’s a more intense cycle we’ll go three and one “off” where we come back to maybe 60 per cent of everything.
MH: Within the cycle of work is there variation? Is there contrast?
BB: Yes, yeah. Front of the cycle is faster stuff, back of the cycle is more back-end (of the race pace).
MH: I love it.
BB: Yeah. It works for him. And James get a chance to swim fast when he’s fresh. Then we’ve just got to try to hold onto that through the back-end. It’s a load of neuro-muscular stuff early and then try to hold onto that as we go more into the back-end stuff.
MH: It’s a concept requiring an understanding of speed endurance as endurance at race speed, or better. But you’ve got to have race speed before you can work on your endurance.
BB: Exactly right.
MH: It’s not the chicken and the egg scenario anymore. That issue has been resolved.
BB: Yeah. Find the race speed and then load it. Load the shit out of it.
