“WIN”. What’s Important Now

  "Good, better, best.  Never let it rest, until your good is better and your better is best." As we start off the new year I'm not going to tell you all to make "New Year Resolutions" because most of the time they end up broken as soon as you make them.  What I will ask you is to continue to do the things that you are already doing well and do them better.  The areas that are weak and need work let's make a commitment now that we are going to focus and improve in those areas to have future success. THE LIST OUT WITH 2022                                    IN WITH 2023 fear of failure                                  everything you want is on the other side of failure focusing on the uncontrollable      recognizing what I can control dwelling on a bad swim.                 why keep something you don't want. let it go. getting in late                                          caps on and ready to go not having my water.                             alway

              

  I want to thank all of you for your best wishes and thoughts this holiday season.  They are very much appreciated.   What a swimmers letter to Santa might look like. Dear Santa, I would like to get off to a great start in 2023 and will need a few things to help me so if you could fill my stocking with any of the items below I would be very grateful.  Hopefully you and your elves will have the correct tools laying around the North Pole to help me in my journey. First off I will need a positive attitude going into the new year.  With school, swimming and life all coming at me I know I will have to keep a positive attitude especially when things get tough and things don't necessarily go my way. Next there will be times in the coming year when I will need an extra shot of motivation.  I like to work hard to reach my dreams and goals but times do arise when I am not motivated and allow those times to affect my work habits.  When those times arise I will need that extra kick to get st

  Today’s topic we will go over some pool workouts that you can do on your own if you’re out of town and can’t make our schedule workouts.   Although it is entirely okay to be out of the pool and enjoy a little break, you do not want to stack too many days out of the pool at this time of year. Here are three workouts for you to choose from. Set your own CHALLENGING intervals.  You can pick and choose and mix up a workout that works for you. Warmups for all three workouts (1000) 300 swim  6x50 kick swim 200 mix swim (free/back) 4x50 free descend (each one 1 second faster than previous one) main sets( pick one) #1 (1200) IM 6x   1x75 (25 fly/ 50 back   1x125 (25 breast wide press fast hands forward to glide/ 100 free #2 (1200) IM 4x 1x50 fly to back 1x50 back 1x50 back to breast 1x50 breast 1x100 free build to fast PINK / RED / BLUE / PURPLE by 25 #3  (1200) FREE 3x 3x100 free (PINK / RED / BLUE ) 2x50 kick 1 with board/ 1 no board wrap it up our usual UWK set with fins (800) 6x  4x2

  It’s race day and as you step onto the block your starting to feel a little anxiety which is not a bad thing, after all you’ve put in all the hard work made the sacrifices and now it’s your time to shine.  How do your emotions play into this scenario?  If you don’t have your emotions in check they can sabotage all of your hard work. "I am not going to allow myself not to perform well just because I don't feel well.  I am bulletproof to the extent that a lot of things can be thrown at me, but it's about how much I am prepared to let them affect me." Ian Thorpe Emotions can run the gamut from the positive to the negative and includes everything that falls in between.  The positive emotions will serve you well giving you strength and that quite confidence whereas those negative emotions serve as a weakness in your chink of armor.  Swimmers have always and will continue to react in different ways emotionally.  You need to develop a strategy on how to control your emoti

Is the following statement true, “ swimming takes so much of my time I have no time for anything else.”   How do you juggle everything such as swimming, school, rest, homework, family, friends and everything else that comes at you every day.  It’s a lot but manageable if you have a positive mindset that allows you to let things go when they smack you in the face. Finding balance is about planning in advance.  Let's break down your week and Ill fill in the hours that I can and you can do the rest. the day has 24 hours the week has 7 days the week has 168 hours swimming takes up depending on your group or amount of workouts 3 hours/4 hours/6 hours/7.5. (figure out where you fall)  that leaves about 160.5 hours at a minimum.  Thats about 5% of your week.   Interesting fact school takes up about 6.5 hours of the day, totaling 32.5 hours of your week (about 19% of your week) home work takes an average of________ hours per day.  You need to fill that one out. Breakfast and dinner takes a

Although your first thought might have been, “Oh no school work” but no after reading an article I thought it might be fun to put the alphabet in a swimmers framework.  As much time you put into the pool with all the hard physical work we sometimes forget about the mental side of the sport.  Let’s shine a light on the “swimmers alphabet”,  we will keep it brief and come back to the letters that you want to dive into, so here we go; A - is for anxiety 😣 B- building a mindset👍 C - confidence 😎 D- dedication  E- emotional control 🥲 ' F- fear ☠️ G- goals🏊‍♀️ H- having fun 🤩  I- injuries and understanding them🚑 J- juggling 🤹‍♀️ everything K- keeping the peace👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 L- leadership  M- motivation N- negative self-talk 🤮 O- overtraining  P- perfectionist 🧖🏼‍♂️ Q- quality practice 🏊🏻‍♂️🏊‍♀️ R- resiliency 🧗🏼‍♀️ S- stress management  T- team building  U- underperforming  V-  visualization 🪞 W- winning 🥇  X- X factor ( the variable needed to obtai

  With the last meet of 2022 taking place this weekend I urge each of you to look at your goals and tweak them if you need to.  Look at your event to see if you need any for qualification purposes.  Following is the schedule of meets through FEBRUARY for your planning purposes.  Figure out what you need and please don’t wait until the last moment.  Do it now before the holidays get busy.  Your swimming is just that, yours.  TAKE OWNERSHIP.  Excuses are only a reason for failure.  Don’t go down that hole where you can’t climb out.  You have questions, write them down, bring them in and ask?  We are here to help you but you need to ask.  Just so you know my objective is to qualify as many swimmers for 14 and under champs and the national meet in Florida. JANUARY DISTANCE MEET January  7 1650 (mile) January 8 1000 This is a great opportunity to come in and knock one of these events off our list.  You have an estimated time to come in warmup swim and go home.  Start the new year off by doi

Hope that you all are enjoying the little break after a long weekend of swimming.  We were all witnessed to some exciting races with a lot of personal bests being posted from all of our Mako swimmers.  First off we would like to thank all the parents for volunteering throughout a long challenging weekend and for getting your swimmers back and forth to the pool on time and safely each day.  We could not have had the success without your support and we know your swimmers appreciate it even though they sometimes forget to say it. Parents, have you ever wondered what coaches and swimmers talk about after a race?  Some of it is very interesting and can pretty much cover A-Z and everything in between.  Some are short, sweet and to the point and then we have the ones who want to present their graduate thesis where your eyes start bugging out and when your done you look up and you've missed several swimmers.   To give you a better glimpse of how a coach has to become a psychologist with

  I was having "writers block" the last few days to have a topic to discuss going into this weekends races so I reached out to a fellow coach and parent for suggestions and she said "teamwork", so let's see what we can do with this topic. Swimming, individual or team sport?  What are your thoughts on the subject?  You may have to think outside the box when you answer that one. Swimming by it's very nature can be a very individual sport if you allow it to happen. What do you think would happen to the dog in the picture if his little teammate/friend was not there to help him out ?  Probably would have been able to get his toy but then would have to do a little dog paddle to get to the side, and then would he have been able to climb out?  Endless possibilities, but all avoided because of TEAMWORK. As we said at the beginning swimming by nature can be a very individual and lonely sport if you allow it.  Think about it you dive in and begin your journey down that

  Hopefully today finds each of you safely at your Holiday destinations surrounded by family and friends.  Each of you should take a moment today and look around and really be thankful for all that you have and I'm not talking about the material things, I'm talking about the things that truly make your life a happy one. As for your swimming endeavors this is a great time to take stock and relish all the accomplishments you made in the last year.  For sure there were goods times and bad times, good swims and bad swims, vans with dents in them, finals in a thunderstorm, and long car rides with Heather.  But you all got to swim, race and meet new friends along the way and these are the things you should be thankful for in this sport for they will lAst longer than ribbons and medals.  They last a LIFETIME.  Where else can you dive in become fully submerged with only you, your dreams and goals away from all the Noise of daily life.  Be Thankful for that feeling. I know I'm thank

Another swim and rock has come and gone.  We hope that you all enjoyed yourself over the three days of racing.  I know that swim and rock was always my daughters favorite meet of the year. It was great watching a lot of you doing the things that we worked on in practice and doing at such a high level during the races.  Our walls are getting stronger with each meet and we will continue to put a lot of emphasis on them.  The effort on the UW was outstanding and we will keep doing our little "perfect set" as wee move through our journey.  Do I expect you to get to the 15M mark?  No not at this stage but what I do expect is that the effort is there to get better off every wall.  A lot of the UW is a mental block.  That mental block is "being comfortable when your uncomfortable", in other words, being uncomfortable underwater. We saw a lot of swimmers post "personal bests" throughout the weekend and you all should be very proud of your hard work.  A lot of swim

 "I am building a fire, and every day I train, I add more fuel.  At just the right moment, I light the match."   We have a big weekend of racing coming up with the annual Swim and Rock meet at Oak Mar.  Our first prelim/final meet of our journey this season.  This will be a good measuring stick to see where we're at, in our journey this season.  As  such we would like to take a moment to go over some information about the meet. WARM UP TIMES: FRIDAY AND SATURDAY FINALS 5:00-5:50 PM FRIDAY 11 and over 7:40-8:20 boys pool 3-7 WU pool 1-4 SATURDAY- 13 and over 7:00-7:40 Girls pool 1-8 WU 3-4                        11-12 year olds 11:25-11:00-11:50 Girls pool 1-8                          9-10 year olds 2:50-3:10 Girls pool 1-8. WU 3-4 SUNDAY- 13 and over 7:30-8:00 Girls pool 1-5 WU 2-4                   11-12 year olds 11:00-11:25 Boys pool 1-7                     9-10 year olds 3:20-3:40 Girls pool 1-8. WU 3-4 POSITIVE CHECK IN Those of you may have events that need to be

  You were ask to write down 2 practice and 2 meet fears that you all face in your swimming.  Some of you gave them to me and some did not but now the time has come to take a look at these fears.   Let's take a look at these fears and see if we can come up with some coping mechanisms that you can use to deal with them.  There are no guarantees or promises that your fears will disappear.  The hope is that you can get to a point were they don't control you, as you step onto the blocks and that you are in a better position to remain calm and relax and just GO FOR IT. The list; PRACTICE FEARS having a fear with some part of my body (shoulder, cramps, head, foot) (5) not making the interval (3) getting lapped (2) being in a hard lane not keeping up and being behind doing an easy practice for long time because I feel I won't improve never be as fast as friends (2) getting injured having to sit out because I'm tired and getting embarrassed  missing practice distractions Gettin

  Sometimes swimmers have the misconception that in order to become a stronger swimmer you can add more workouts to your week or add time to each workout.  This is true to a small extent but in order to gain strength and become stronger it will require some work and dedication from your part away from the pool.  Yes we are talking about a strength and conditioning program to not only supplement your swimming but your everyday health.   We have been working with CAPSTONE PERFORMANCE TRAINING to come up with a program suitable for our needs.  They have designed two different programs to choose from.  The first is a on line/ hybrid model and the second is a hybrid model.  We asked them to design a 2x a week program which is perfect for you all.  We have also asked that it should be a swimming specific program. They have designed similar programs for other swimmers in our area.  Below you will find the information.