We take a two week break in August. This break is great because a year round swimmer really doesn't have too many opportunities to take a break. Many younger ones don't want to stay out of the water for two weeks in August, but it is good that they do take the break. It eventually weighs on them after doing multiple years of consistent swimming, to the point that feel like the sport is never ending. (Well, it has become never ending because they chose to swim over the swim clubs break).
Out of the break I have changed what I do with my swimmers. My young groups I still go back to basics, but my older advanced age-groupers I have trended to doing aerobic work with an emphasis on kicking. This allows the body to get back in shape, and with limited swimming, it doesn't allow for too much bad habits from bad stroke that may be a cause of being out of the water.
I include many basic drills into the workouts, this is to reinforce basic technique that may have been lost in the short break. I also include a day of some sculling (which was yesterday) to try to get a feel back for the water.
I did include a swimming aerobic set yesterday that consisted of gradual increase in freestyle yardage and some 100 IM's. This was for aerobic development utilizing some IM to maximize total muscle work for the workout.
Freestyles thus far have been mainly low hypoxic repeats.
Dryland has been big for the first week. I am going to try to build strength earlier on this season.
Once aerobic has begun to develop, as well as total body strength, then I plan to go into stroke work phase that also concentrates on DPS (Distance Per Stroke). This is different, as my stroke work and DPS phase I normally start with, but I think that doing stroke work while in a little better shape may provide for better results for swimmers who have some more developed strokes than those of our three lower age-group groups.
Every season I try to do things a little different since I have swimmers who are going to end up in my group for 2 - 4 years. Switching things around allows me to test different approaches to developing the swimmer in the beginning of the season, but also provides that change from season to season to not allow it to become too stale.
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