Freestyle: "swim with your whole body"

How do we develop a smooth efficient whole body stroke? 

 I think of fish, who shimmer effortlessly through water using their core bodies, using their tails and fins for balance and direction changes. 

 If we can first balance on our sides, flutter kicking, head looking down, leading arm at 45 degrees, relaxed and weightless, ready to "catch", and we get our other arm ready to slice into the next stroke, high shoulder and high hip all snap all together with the last flick of our kick into a balanced position on the other side. That's what this drill on the video is helping a swimmer to feel.

 

Breaststroke: Underwater pullouts and swimming

Where do you put the dolphin kick in the underwater pullout?
How big a kick do you take?
What do you do with your arms and hands to sneak them forward after the kick?
While swimming, how quickly do you get your kick around and back into streamline?
How wide is your pull?  How wide is your kick?
How do you draw your feet up (toes in?  toes out?) before the whip?

Watch Kosuke Kitajima at real speed in this first video.  See the underwater swimming at about :30

 

In this next video, watch a swimmer who puts the dolphin kick at the end of the pullout out armpull in the beginning of the video.  Kitajima slow motion follows, who puts the dolphin kick at the beginning of the armpull.

Err on the side of FUN

We coaches come to practice with the goal that swimmers learn something, and we tend to talk too much in our attempt to teach.  However, with young swimmers especially, we should remember that if we err on the side of practice being more "fun", the kids will return, and we will get another chance to teach them some more.  Less talking, more doing.  That's my goal this season.

About 8 years ago, a high school girl complained to me "Swimming isn't any fun. All you want to do is win."  First of all, she said this when I caught her hiding in the locker room when she should have been at morning practice.  Second, it has never been true that all I cared about was winning.  (And third, this swimmer has since matured and would probably be appalled at herself if she heard this story again.)

Actually, winning IS fun.  And so is trying your best and improving and learning.  And doing it with your friends on a team.  And getting in shape.  And doing different things every day.  The USA Swimming Parent Swimposium presentation at the November HOD (see the link to this off the landerswimclub.org website) has a list of what kids say makes swimming fun for them:

• Being with friends
• Coach compliments and encourages me
• Being known as a good swimmer
• Winning races
• Getting in shape
• Varied workouts
• Relays where team comes together
• Feelings of accomplishment
• Cheering for each other/coming together as a team
• Trying to improve my times; Being on a team

Often, when kids leave swimming, they return to it later.  We want kids to get the fundamentals of swimming, and we also want them to experience a wide range of physical and athletic activities, from dance and gymnastics to baseball, soccer, football, basketball, wrestling, skiing, volleyball, track, rodeo, music, drama, scouts, camping, bowling... so many other choices to explore!  So often, we see kids who swam with us when they were young, go off to do other things, and then come back to swimming successfully in middle school and high school.

Here's another interesting list from the symposium presentation.  We can do our best to make things fun, and kids and families may still choose other activities.

Why Kids Quit?
1. Takes Too Much Time 18%
2. Coach Was Negative 15%
3. Enjoy Other Activities More 15%
4. Swimming Was Boring 9%
5. Lack Of Fun 8%
6. Parents’ Emphasis On Winning 6%

What's the best mistake you made this week?

Mistakes can be the source of great learning.
We often think of "mistakes" as bad, and something to be avoided, or hidden, but I think of them as useful indicators of things I have yet to learn, or get better at, or understand.
Ideally, we live and work in environments where mistakes are ok to make, and there is space to talk about them, share them, analyze them, and become wiser from them.  Ideally, we aren't shamed or fearful or punished for them.   Let's try to make new and different mistakes.  If we find ourselves making the same mistake over and over, we just haven't yet learned the lesson that the mistake is trying to teach us.

This week, my best mistake was losing emotional control and yelling at a swimmer.
Again.
I got angry and yelled at a swimmer who consistently irritates me when he acts in unsafe ways and is disrespectful to his teammates.  I've tried many approaches in the last few years I've worked with him.... I ignore him, I talk to him, use logic, humor, positive and negative consequences.  Nothing has worked, and we repeat our pattern, he misbehaves, I yell at him.
Now, I am not a yeller.  I don't like myself when I yell.  first, it doesn't do any good, and second, it just reinforces what this swimmer wants from everyone, negative attention.  So, after I caught myself making this mistake again, I see that the true solution is to examine myself closer (why does this person trigger me so often?) and to shift my perspective to be grateful for this opportunity to really understand something, about both of us, but mainly about me.

"The troublemakers in your life are your best teachers."  (Pema Chodron)






"Do not wish that your problems get smaller or go away, rather wish that your ability to deal with the problems expands."

Thank you, 2013.... Happy New Year!

Thank you, kind readers, for reading this blog, a place where ideas and conversation about swimming, coaching and learning can be shared.  I welcome all your comments.

To say farewell to 2013, here's a fun video, an underwater dream and tribute to the creativity of the work we do.  Some of you have seen this, but if you haven't, enjoy!







How this video was made:

Sun Yang....technique and training for efficiency leads to speed

Sun Yang won the 800m free in Barcelona this July.  Watch and learn.  His stroke is so easy, long, strong, and efficient.  He leads, barely kicking, just holding beautiful form, and then blows everyone away in the last 100m.  (He takes 27 strokes per 50 meters).




Terry Laughlin of Total Immersion talks about efficiency and training:

"Invite speed.  Don't chase speed, let it come.

Train in thoughtful, personalized ways.

Swimming faster has little to do with how many yards you swim or at what heart rate.

Speed comes as a natural outgrowth of the Kaizen pursuit of continual improvement.

The secret to speed isn't the yardage or intensity of the workouts but by making your strokes more effective, then maintaining efficiency while dialing up the stroke tempo in small, controlled increments.  

This kind of practice is mentally and physically energizing instead of exhausting."

What if we radically rethink our traditional methods and assumptions of swim practice and swimming?
Can we do more with less?
What kind of quality would the "less" have to have?
People have gone fast with lots of intense yardage for years... is it a traditional rite or passage or could we do the same with a focused swimmer in half the time and yardage?  In 1/3 of the time?  In 1/4 of the time?
If we increase quality and decrease quantity, what would the quality be made up of?

We say swimming "garbage" yards is a waste.  What does it take for a swimmer to swim every yard with a highly conscious, mindful focus?  Can we train swimmers to stay focused and not "zone out" during swims?  Swimming can be done in autopilot and you won't drown, unlike a rock climber who would most likely fall if they weren't paying close attention.  How do we keep the mind engaged, problem solving constantly, improving, learning and adapting at an increased rate?

The tools Total Immersion uses for training efficiency are stroke rate, distance per stroke and the tempo trainer, demanding totally focused conscious intentional swimming, solving puzzles with every set.

Read this by Joe Novak, an NCAA West Point swimmer who trained with Terry Laughlin:
http://archive.totalimmersion.net/2005articles/january/novak.html

H2O: Water, it tastes good

We produced this video a few years ago with 5 Lander swimmers who swam as young age groupers and through high school and several into college.    All strokes, turns and starts are included in this video.

Enjoy Aaron Steele, Mei and Willy Ratz, Erin Stotts and Nick Robinson swim and talk about swimming.

Thank you to Lander Swim Club for funding this project.

(One error in this youtube version is that Nick Robinson is mistyped as Robertson.  My apologies to Nick.)