My oldest son is special needs.  When he was born, he had his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and wasn't able to get oxygen to his bran fast enough.  The end result is that he has a difficult time 'finding his words' and remembering things, and it may take him a few times of doing something before he 'gets it'.  However, he's a straight-A student in a normal high school and takes honors classes to boot - so he's a hard worker.

He's self-aware of his disabilities and does things to cope with it, like using reminders on his phone, calendar, etc.  If it matters, and that we're hard enough, he's also a Type-1 diabetic (NOT type 2).

Anyway, he's a good athlete and I'm getting to my question. He does year-round competitive swimming for a club team and even made the HS state championships this year as a Sophomore.  He has decided to double-down and about 8 months ago, added weightlifting to his routine.  He swims 6 days a week for 2 hours a day (his choice, with his team) and weight lifts on M, W, F.  He's 5'8" and weighs 131 lbs and is very well defined (ie, 6 pack abs, etc).

However, in his swimming, I've become convinced that he isn't really 'pushing' himself.  When he competes and gets out of the water, he barely needs to breath out his mouth and has no trouble having normal conversation right after competing in a 100 Free (full sprint) or even a 500 Free race.  Recently, his coaches have had the team begin taking heart rate measurements in practice at the end of sprint sets (count beats with 2 fingers on your neck for 10 seconds and multiply by 6).  He usually gets about 24-26 beats, which puts him at ~144-156bpm.  His max heart rate is  220-15 = 205.  A 150bpm puts him at 70-74% max heart rate.  I had him wear a smart watch last practice and it confirmed that he's not breaking that 75% barrier.  I've had talks with him about feeling like he's got a whole other level he's just not getting to, but he insists that he's doing all he can and going as fast as he can.  He likes swimming and it's his choice to do all this work (he can quit any time without issue).  He's a very careful person, naturally - not a risk-taker - so I am wondering if he's scared to push too hard, since he's never had to "suck wind" really.

How can I help him push his ability to get his heart rate into that 80-90% zone and move him from aerobic to anaerobic?  I feel like him not being able to do that is blocking him from really improving.

If he's not the type to push then he may never be.

But....good athletes don't need to push the rev limiter every time, at least not in team sports. Racing may be a different depending on the distance, but in team sports consistency and not messing up will usually win the day.

How does he do in longer races compared to shorter ones? He may just have a niche and he doesn't know it yet.

Sprint training and stuff like shuttle runs may help him learn to dig a little deeper with the right coach. You get comfortable being uncomfortable.

I never did track or any solo stuff though it was always soccer and basketball so really I'm only used to team settings, where even in practice you had something to compare yourself to in your teammates.

Nothing more motivating than knowing that if you finish first in a hill sprint that you "win" and don't have to run the next one.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not good at digging deep without immediate competition, and it's why I'll never be all that good at lifting weights. If I'm on the field with someone though....I do not like losing in that moment. Practicing by myself, I'm not going to push very hard.

One thing (and it's stupid) that made a noticeable improvement in my play in high school, was when I started to get laid. When the girls are watching you certainly try a little harder during a game.

I recently got into swimming...and up until this Christmas I believed the same thing as you.  If you aren't getting out of the water gassed, you aren't really pushing it.  ARFCOM advised me to get "Total Immersion" by Terry Laughlin.  

Between reading Total Immersion (which you should get for your son), and watching "Skills 'n Talents" on YouTube I kept hearing and seeing the same things.  The real fast swimmers aren't the ones thrashing the water hard and wasting energy.  Swimming isn't running. Swimming is like a golf or baseball bat swing, a whole body symphony of movement, which when done right propels you fast with little physical exhertion.  A golf or baseball bat swing starts in your feet, flows up through your legs, rotates your hips, explodes through your core, and your arms are like the end of a whip that CRACK when it hits the ball.

There are supposedly a few rare people who natually understand this in swimming.  It's not kicking your feet and swinging your arms.  It's a similar feel to the golf swing or baseball bat swing where the motion flows through your body.  

It sounds like your son may just be one of those people who get the real art of swimming.

His coach (and his dad *hint hint*) even sound like the coaches talked about in Total Immersion Swimming.

I appreciate the replies thus far.



Coaches emphasize beating your personal best each race; that's the goal.  For swimming, events are done in heats.  For example, you have 40 swimmers that enter an event and 8 lanes in the pool.  They divide that group into 5 "heats" with the fastest seeded times going last.  So "Heat 1" is made up of the 8 slowest seed times that swim together, "Heat 2" is a group of 8 with a little bit faster times, etc.  It makes each "heat" appear more competitive.  My son does well - he's motivated to win his heat each time; he's very competitive in that sense.  In the meet this weekend, he's achieved personal bests in all the events he swam, except one where he was close.




He's still trying to find his niche.  He's not the tallest, and sprinting (ie, 50 yard races) in swimming heavily favors taller swimmers, as it's less distance they have to cover in the pool and winning comes down to tenths or hundredths of a second in many races.  He's taken more to middle distance (200Y-500Y) events, but he likes to swim everything.




Thanks.  I am familiar with him - or rather his technique.  IIRC, it's geared more towards Triathalon, Iron Man, long distance and open water swimming rather than short-distance sprint events, and in elite competitive swimming, pretty much every event under the 400/500 M/Y events are sprints.  He's got great form...  good starts, good turns, bilateral breathing (which is rare for swimmers)...  he's got a lot of endurance, but he spends all his practices in the aerobic fitness area heartrate - he doesn't ever venture into anaerobic or hit above 80-90% max heart rate.  It's almost like he's scared to push his body that hard because it's uncomfortable or "scary".  I can understand TIS technique for Triathalon, and IM competition and why you want to keep your HR moderate...  but you should hit max HR in swimming sprints.  Take a look at any Olympic swimming race - any distance - and look at the close ups when they finish and how they are breathing.  They can't talk; they are breathing heavily out of their mouths - very clearly hitting near their max heart rate...  but because of their conditioning, they recover fairly quickly.  My son is conditioned well and has great endurance - but it's that max HR he hasn't ever really approached.

Attempt to drown him. Make him fight to get above water for a minute or two so. See if he's short of breath when he gets out. I bet he will be. Let him know that he should be swimming that hard during his races. I bet he drops a ton of time.

ETA: My wife is a swim coach, but she refused to offer any suggestions. I guess her methods wouldn't have been better than mine.

It's organized sports, not the Navy SEALs

WTF, dude...  As his father whom he trusts, you're actually suggesting that I attempt to [pretend] drown my special needs son (who has trouble communicating, as I mentioned in OP) as some sort of method to teach him how to increase his heart rate while competing and practicing swimming?!?  ^100

I think you made a way wrong turn somewhere around General Discussion.

Is he, and the rest of the team winning or losing races?

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Doesn't really have anything to do with what I am asking.  Swimming is an individual sport (outside relays) where individual scores are added together to see which team wins (ie, in a High School meet, an individual 1st place earns 10 points, second earns 7 points, third earns 6 points, all the way down to 8th that earns 1 point.  In larger club team meets (hundreds of swimmers), where the top 16 in each event place, the points are adjusted accordingly where 1st earns 20 points, 2nd place earns 17 points, 3rd earns 16 points, down to 16th place that earns 1 point.  Even larger meets may place the top 20 swimmers.

Anyway, he wins some races against some, and loses others.  But my point is that for the amount of time he dedicates to swimming (year round, swimming 2 hours a day, 6 days a week), he isn't improving at the rate that he should be, and it seems to stem from him never getting his heart rate above 70-75% max heart rate.  To really improve, he needs to be hitting 90% max heart rate during sprint sets in practices; he's not.  Nor is he sufficiently winded when he finishes his races.  Any of the heart rate charts will give anecdotal information about what constitutes being in each 'zone' for heart rate.

When he finishes a race, he should not be able to hop right out of the pool, have his mouth closed (breathing out his nose) and carry on normal conversation.  He should be winded and be sucking in more oxygen from an open mouth, and not be able to string together more than a couple words while he catches his breath.  That's what I am saying.  He insists he's "giving it his all", but anecdotal evidence (and empirical evidence) show that he has more he can give.

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I know nothing about swimming and heart rates, but I have the experience of my daughter training in a lucrative niche sport for ten years, during which we tried so hard to make her reach the highest levels and pushed her to compete on the national level, train the hardest, sacrifice all she could to "reach the stars".  Eventually, we realized that she had reached the level where she enjoyed the sport, it felt good to be at the high level, but she did not want to be "the best at all costs", to reach the "no pain, no gain" level and to ignore sweat, tears, risk injuries and stuff like that to be on the podium and be the best.  And we came to terms with that, which made her and us all happier.

She is out of the competitive field. She quit the race when she was 16, but didn't quit the sport and now she is actually coaching little kids and loving it. And we don't have to spend 20K a year to have private coaches, travel all over the country, and have no time for anything but her training and traveling regime.

Not everyone would give 100% and not everyone should.  Let him enjoy the activity, stay fit, have fun, and push your so natural parent's vanity (that we had for 10 years) aside.

I think you can tell before they are even 10 which kids are going to be the athletes that leave it all on the field.

It can be trained later to an extent, but the kids that want to win, no matter what, are like that from a young age.

Like you said though, it's not a huge deal if a kid doesn't, it doesn't diminish them in any way. Athletics are just a small part of life, and something people should enjoy doing, in whatever way they enjoy doing it.

I agree with this - and it was one of the things that my wife and I agreed upon for our kids.  We wouldn't push them to do what they didn't want to, but rather encourage and guide them - and then support them when they made choices.  We put all our kids in activities from soccer, baseball, running, basketball, volleyball, gymnastics, ju jitsu, tae kwon do, swordfit, swimming, tennis, and a few others I can't remember and then let them continue with the ones they preferred.  From a time and cost perspective, it sucks because other than 2 of my kids picking swimming, they all picked different activities - lol.  Either way, we support and encourage them - but they are free to switch or stop when they want.  So this isn't me or my wife trying to live vicariously through our kids and pushing them beyond what they want to do.  "Fun" is the primary goal here...  but when you win, it's a lot more fun.  All our kids are competitive and want to win - they hate losing.

I think that my original question might be less of a fitness one about heart rate and more of a question for someone with some professional experience working with special needs athletes.