Jan Olbrecht was student of Dr. Mader's when I first met him in the early 1980's. Although he has served as a consultant to coaches and athletes from a variety of sports, Jan's first love is competitive swimming. Having been a national champion and record holding swimmer in his native Belgium, he is particularly interested in applying his research to the training of swimmers. When I met him, I was seeking information about training competitive swimmers in general and blood testing in particular and Jan was kind enough to share his knowledge with me. We have remained friends since that time. Jan is a respected scientific professional whose research has been reported in many prestigious journals throughout the world. He is also much sought after as a speaker at scientific meetings. Despite his impressive scientific achievements, Jan remains a practical person who is interested, first and foremost, in communicating his research findings to coaches and athletes in order to help them perform better. For this reason, his research has always been specific to the training situation and his results have always been immediately useful to coaches like myself and others throughout the world. Jan has spent his adult years developing procedures not only to investigate important aspects of training in the laboratory but also to developing monitoring procedures that can be used in the field to help athletes structure their training more effectively. Because of his athletic background, Jan has the ability to communicate the results of his studies to coaches and athletes in understandable and practical terms. For this reason, several coaches urged him to put his information into print, which led to the writing of this book.Within these pages, Jan describes the complex relationship between aerobic and anaerobic training and makes it clear why interpreting the results of blood testing on aerobic endurance without also considering the effect that training had on anaerobic capacity will result in errors of interpretation that may cause coaches to make the wrong judgements about the training needs of their athletes. He advances some new important concepts. Most notably that training at anaerobic threshold speeds is not the most effective way to improve aerobic endurance and that aerobic and anaerobic metabolism must be developed to optimum, not maximum, levels in order to perform well in competition. Also included are his ideas on the planning and periodization of training. These ideas have contributed considerably to the recent success of competitive swimmers and athletes from other sports throughout Europe but particularly in the Netherlands and Belgium. Jan presents this information with understandable writing that is replete with practical examples. There is an excellent section on why training must be individualized even for athletes who compete in the same event. It also includes information on how to "spot" athletes with different physiological makeups and how to adapt training for them. In another important portion of this text he discusses the important aerobic and anaerobic adaptations to training and ways to achieve them including the role played by altitude training. Once again, there are many excellent and practical examples of training sets that will achieve the various results athletes seek. Finally, Jan provides several insightful suggestions concerning the training of age-group competitive swimmers.
I believe coaches and athletes at all stages of development can profit from the information in this book. Further, I
believe the information presented will raise the standard of swimming performance throughout the world.