I spend a lot of time understanding the swim strokes. The different types of strokes that are out there, and how to make sense of why a stroke is effective to propel the body through the water. The problem is that I feel like my swimmers catch on to how much I am dedicated to understanding strokes, that they begin to focus on the strokes only. So I did a practice today to get them to try to change their focus.
The set was fairly simple. 3 rounds of 5 x 100's on a descending interval. My main group tried to do 500 Free Pace on the 1:40 for the first round, then 200 Pace on the 1:30 on the second round, and finishing off with trying to make the interval on the 1:20. My other group was a +10 seconds to the intervals, but the same focus. They had to check the clock each time, and make it a goal to hit the same time for the entire round. The third round was focused on just making the interval as for the group that I coach 1:20 is a challenge.
This set allowed to focus more on their speed, and less on the stroke technique. We have done our period of time for the season that we concentrated on stroke technique, and the group will continue to have parts of workout devoted to developing the strokes further, but the focus of taking ones stroke, and trying to make it faster through other ways than correcting technique. I've seen many swimmers become so focused on stroke technique that they begin to only contribute slow swimming to bad technique, when there are other factors that come into play.
Through the season I have designated times where I work on different aspects. I normally start with conditioning with kicking (a lot of kicking) and drills that are leg driven. I then spend a period of time where I go over body position, hand patterns, and timing. I am entering the stage where the swimmers will focus on what they are actually doing in the water, and for them to make self-correction. (This is based on the idea of developing myelin in the brain as described in The Talent Code.) This is also the phase where I'll bump up the conditioning. The next phase will be more like the set described above, as we begin to focus on developing speed. Then I will go into a phase where I will concentrate on little things such as: starts, turns, transitions, and other race skills. This period of time is normally a spot where the swimmers will get rested as working on these aspects take away from the training time (so it is a form of resting). This is normally where we will go to a Winter Championship meet, WAG in Vegas for us this year. The next phase is where I'll be making my biggest adjustment from last year, as I feel like our JO Meet in February was sub par last year. I'll probably go right back to training and working on developing speed through the developed strokes rather than a stroke development phase as I did last year. I will again do race skills to begin to rest the swimmers, and then finish off with timed swims with long easy swims to go into the JO meet. The Stroke Development will begin after the JO Meet, and the Long Course Season will be very similar to the Short Course Season.
I will try to lose focus either. I feel like I slipped a little bit last week, as I focused more on racing skills rather than get the conditioning in as I had originally planned. I'm back on track though, and the set today was a good way to get back on track.
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