Halloween

Hope everyone in the Gold and Blue groups enjoy your day away from 🏊‍♀️ and you have your costumes ready for the evening.  You have probably heard this from Mom and Dad but stay with your group and be safe.  Please do your bodies a favor and watch that sugar intake over the next few days.  We all know it tastes good but the hours that follow a big increase in your sugar levels will not be kind, just ask Jackie.

The next two weeks will be a busy time for all of us as we prepare for the Marlin Meet, and the all exciting Swim and Rock the following weekend.  As we get ready for this I thought I would spend a little time going over what we have been doing.  This serves as both a quick reminder to each of you and gives your parents some input so they know what you have been doing.

One of the big things I have noticed in the first two weeks is our lack of aggressiveness with our walls.   We are always 👨🏻‍🏫👩🏻‍🏫talking to you and reminding you just how important your under water dolphin🐬 kicks are and how this is really the fifth stroke.  We went back and reviewed our early plan and decided that we need to insert a set to address this for all the groups.  We will continue this for the next few weeks with some variations to it and also by including something into the sets.  You all have been awesome because we have definitely seen the improvement and are excited about seeing each of you include this element into your races over the next few weeks.  Above all it’s not a quick fix, and it takes time but we see the improvement, so keep up the great work!

In all three groups we have spent a lot of time over the last few weeeks on our fly and you all have responded very well to what we were trying to accomplish.  One of the big thing we have stressed in setting up your breathing pattern.  We talked about how you can get away without breathing too much in the 50, but as that distance increases your 💪 need that oxygenated blood to perform efficiently, so remember our saying “breathe, breathe, don’t breathe”.  For our swimmers in the blue group it is important to get adequate air in your 50’s but please not every stroke.  For everyone we should never be breathing on those first strokes off ANY wall no matter what stroke.  Wait a minute “my bad” you can breathe in back.😁

The Blue group has spent a couple of weeks working on counting our strokes in back and how a proper turn is done.  This will always be a work in progress for this group as they are growing and they refine their strokes.  Just so the parents understand as  I look at the program i will stay with a particular item long enough to foster a muscle memory for your swimmer.  This way we hope they are able to draw on that in a race.  Thus the need for pool time and consistency.Keep up the good work!

The Senior Prep group in addition to working on a lot of fly have started using their tempo trainers during practice and have responded very well as we work on getting their optimum stroke rates.

The always exciting Gold group has been doing a lot of the same things, and we have paid a lot of attention to our transitions at the walls.  Parents note we did not use the term turn because it’s not, all they are doing is changing directions and we are trying to keep the head in line as we throw our hips into the wall.

For all the groups we will be putting a lot of speed work in the next few weeks as we get ready for the meets.

Thanks Parents

HAVE A GREAT NIGHT🎃🎃🎃

🎃HAPPY HALLOWEEN 🎃

It’s the season of ghosts, goblins, witches, and all kinds of other scary things.  In swimming have you ever thought about what scares you before a race?  Is it the possibility of failing, or is it the fear of pain (the good kind), maybe the thought of letting a coach or parent down.  Whatever it is everyone has come face to face with this fear from time to time.

This may push some buttons with some, but I truly believe that society has become soft when dealing with failure especially when it comes to athletes and our youth.  Failure is inevitable, every athlete has to face coming up short of their goals sometime during their time in the sport.  You will miss that net in soccer, you will strike out, you will miss the basket, you will drop the ball and yes you will fall on the ice, and though you may not like it, I want you to understand that it is 👌.  It’s part of the journey through life and the ☀️ will rise the next day and everything in your world will be okay.

If you do not come up short from time to time than I believe that you are not doing more to get to your goal.  We have talked before about staying in your comfort zone and not taking that first step out of that zone to see what the possibilities are.  If you notice I took out the word failure in this paragraph because maybe the word itself is what causes all the stress and fear.  Maybe the first step to overcoming fear is to remove the word from our vocabulary.  

Getting hung on the fear of failure, the final time distracts swimmers from learning opportunities that occur after the race.  I say this because as coaches we try to offer suggestions for each swimmer to take back to practice to better prepare them for the next race.  However, what we see and hear a lot of time is disappointment in that final time, and all they hear is noise out of our 👄.

After experiencing a bad race, a swimmer has two choices.  They can either feel bad about themselves and the outcome from the event, or they can take the positive road and learn from what happened and come back smarter and stronger for the next race.  Taking the second option will build your confidence and resilience in the sport.  Confidence cannot be built in the presence of fear.  When you step out of the comfort zone and conquer a race,you don’t fear it any longer.

I submit to you that an athlete who is over protected comes to believe that success should always be quick and easy, and all that does is lead to greater frustration when it doesn’t. In swimming 🏊‍♀️ this situation is instant with that posting of a swimmers final time.  A lot of the process is lost such as, are the streamlines better, are the turns a little faster, are the strokes a little better, and did we swim the race a little smarter than before.  Another big outcome that is overlooked is the place that is posted.

Long term success in this or any other sport is more important than the short term results.  A temporary defeat is not the end of the 🌎, think of it as feedback and part of the process to make you stronger and smarter the next time you dive into that 🏊‍♀️.

RACE WARM UP AND COOL DOWN

🏊As we start to get near our busy fall schedule of meets, we thought it useful to review your 📋warm ups and cool downs.  Remember that if you know what to do and are in control without coaches talking 🧟‍♂️“loudly” every time your at a wall it will go a long way to put you in a stress free situation.  

The most important thing is to arrive on time.  It is unfair to your teammates and coaches to arrive late when we are in the middle of a planned warmup, and now you think I’ll just jump in, I don’t think so!

Another item that came up this past weekend is the fact that we had “senior level swimmers”🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♀️ who did not know what they were swimming.  This makes it hard to do a positive check in not to mention that mentally you are not prepared to race and swim fast.  Again it comes back to the person in the mirror, so check it and take ownership.

 MEET WARM UP: SENIOR PREP

400 swim (free and back)

4x50 free descending speed

200 kick

3x50 kick descending speed

6x50 stroke free

8x25 easy fast

2 dives fast

100 warm down

MEET WARMUPS GOLD GROUP

200 swim (free back)

4x50 free descend to fast

150 kick

3x50 kick descend to fast

100 IM drill

5x50 stroke free

6x25 easy fast

2 dives

100 warm down

Not it’s time to do some stretching and get warm.  I still see a lot of you walking around with no shirts, sweatshirts.  Now think about it we have just spent a lot of time warming up and now you neglect all of that work by walking around letting your 💪 get cold and tight.  All this means is that it will take that long to warm them up all over again.  Stop jeopardizing your races by doing things to make you swim slower.  Though you believe the fact that you are warm, your muscles 💪 are screaming for help🙆🏻‍♂️🙆🏻‍♀️ to keep them warm so they may perform for what you are about to ask of them and that is to RACE.

The other part of warmup is that second one.  You should do this so that you allow from 10-12 minutes from the time you get out of the pool until you step on the blocks.  The purpose of this is to wake you up, get the blood flowing and the heart ❤️ rate elevated a bit.  Keep it simple. A couple of 50’s with some of our all out 25’s where we kick 12.5 all out and swim 12.5 all out without slowing the kick down.  Rest 40-50 seconds and repeat 4 times, get warm go to the blocks and RACE

After your race go immediately to warm down.  I see a lot of you waiting ten or more minutes,  it guess what you missed that window of opportunity.  See the coaches after you cool down, and get a good warm down after your last event.  This is your alone time to relax and maybe go though your race “”good or bad” and just maybe unplug from the environment.

LET’S FINISH THE WEEK STRONG

RAISE YOUR STANDARDS

I got to thinking after this weekends meet after hearing all the feedback given to swimmers after their races and started wondering how many of those swimmers go back to their training sessions and try to focus on that feedback.  A lot of the feed back I hear is on breakouts,breathing,turns, underwater dolphins, finishes, and being more aggressive.  With that said I would guess that coaches wonder if the athletes listened and truly heard what we were saying, because I venture to say the same mistakes are being made at the next practice.

We all know what we should do as athletes to become better swimmers, but most of the time those only happen when it is convenient, when it’s comfortable or when it is going your way.  I would like to challenge all of the blue, gold and senior prep groups to turn those things we should do, into things that we MUST do and raise our standard as swimmers.

When you go back to the pool raise your standards at every turn.  Yes you should have fast turns and long fast underwater’s but until you go from the should to the must your standards remain the same, the needle does not move.

If you want to move that needle change your standards.  If you do 5x200 backstroke as we did last week and all your walls are short weak with little or no dolphins, that is who you become in your races, (YOUR STANDARD).  When you go up against faster swimmers you raise your standards or else they own you.

If you want to raise your standards you need and MUST USE THOSE TOOLS all the time not just when it is convenient or fits into your schedule.

LET’s HAVE A GREAT WEEK

PACKING THE BAG

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦Whose job is it to be packing your swim bags 💼for practice and meets.  Mom’s, Dad’s brother or sisters, I don’t like to answer with a question but the simple answer is “Who is doing the swimming?”  Again it is the person in the mirror and 😮 IT’s you.  Funny how it’s always you in the mirror!  Why even bring this subject up, simple we had some set backs this weekend at the meet ( no names will be mentioned).  Items to always have in your bag, 2 swim suits, 2 or more caps, ( they rip) 2 pairs of goggles (they break)2 shirts (they get wet) sweat shirt and paints (to stay warm)and a water bottle.  The old man ( not me ) said if it can go wrong it will so be prepared and it will avoid extra stress during the course of the meet.  Has to do with that thing called time management we have talked about.

It’s your race nobody else’s and one of the first key to success is to take responsibility and own it, and it begins with being prepared to take the plunge, so pack those backpacks and dive in

The 400 IM swim

We have worked for a couple of weeks now to prepare for this race, so what are we looking for?  The first thing is to relax and don’t stress over it and remember the ☀️ will rise from the east in the morning. REALLY it will! Let’s break it up into 4 races shall we!

🏊

The first leg is the fly and the big positive during this leg is that we start from a dive so we really won’t be doing a 100 fly.  The first thing We want you all to remember is to set that breathing patten immediately.  BREATHE-BREATHE-DON’T BEATHE !  It is very important to keep that flow of oxygen to your arms and especially your legs.  It’s a marathon in a way not a sprint.  The other key thing is We want to see your booty out of the water every time your arms enter forward and you press your chest, otherwise you are just dragging yourself through the water. That strong kick in fly takes the pressure off the shoulders saving them for the other legs in the race.

🏊🏻‍♂️🏊🏻‍♂️

The second leg is the backstroke and this is not the time to relax and get lazy.  Its actually time to shift our focus from the legs to the arms trying to maintain a good tempo with good rotation.  Don’t spin the arms, but it should not look lazy, keep the head back in the 💦 and let your shoulders roll.  The legs are not that important throughout this leg, let the arms work for you especially you non breaststrokers.

🏊🏊🏊

What we are looking for during this leg is a long stroke, holding that streamline out front until you snap the legs together.  It is during this leg that a lot of breast stroke swimmers make their move, but what we don’t want to see is for them to take the second leg completely off.  If breast is not your strong stroke, this is not the time to panic, stay within yourself and swim your race, keep it long.

🏊🏊🏊

Here we go the last leg, let’s get excited we are 75% finish with the race.  Coming out of the third leg we want you to be aggressive with a fast tempo of the arms and keep it long.  Hold off on that strong kick until that last 50 and then let’s crush it.  You remember all that air we got in fly, this is the leg where your body reaps those awards.  If you followed the plan your arms and legs should not lock up.  During this leg try to match the fly split.

All of you are pretty intelligent and should have noticed a pattern; legs,arms,legs,arms.   Get your air in the fly, keep the hips up with a good kick, backstroke focus on the arms and rotation.  During the breast leg keep it long, finish that kick before your hands move, and during the free keep the arm tempo fast and crush the kick on the last 50.

HAVE FUN WITH IT GUYS

HAPPY WEDNESDAY

MEETS THIS WEEKEND

OCTOBER OPEN HAS BEEN MOVED TO LEE DISTRICT POOL

Friday night all the swimmers must have their own timers.

Friday night all 400 IM and 200 Fly must positive check in by 6:00. If you are planning to arrive late and would like us to check you in PLEASE send Coach Wendy or myself a text by 12:00 noon and we will take care of it.  Also if you are going to scratch on Friday let us know so we are not looking for you.

What happens to your mindset as you enter the 🏊🏻‍♂️water for practice and you come head to head with that cold chlorinated water, and that dreaded black tile line on the bottom of the pool that will guide you for the next 60-90 minutes of your life.  Do you stress🙀 on whether this training session will get you to your goals?  Are you stressed 😩with homework, what others think, or the weekend?  There are no guarantees that what you do today will take you to the place you want to be tomorrow, all we can do is to put you in the best position to get to that place.  

What you have to accept is that merely wanting something really bad doesn’t make it happen.  It takes a certain mindset 💡also to get there. All thethings mentioned above will always lead back to the same person that we have talked about before and that’s the little man 🧜🏼‍♂️living between your ears dictating your mind set.  Good or bad he/she will affect your performance at practice and meets.  Even though most of us know what we have to do in order to get to our final goal, we hesitate to pull that trigger or expend that energy and effort to improve what’s happening behind those goggles.  Ok how do we fix your mindset, it starts with the person in the mirror!  Example we had to repeat those 200 backstrokes yesterday three times because we could not do it right, and even though we it finally clicked, it threw the rest of the workout off and we had to shorten our kick set which affects the rest of the week, and long term hurts YOU ALL!  

If you have notice everything we do in practice has a purpose and leads to the next thing.  Let’s use yesterday Senior Prep workout as an example.  Towards the end of practice we were getting fatigued and all of a sudden the last set was an ALL OUT kick set without boards.  Some of you looked puzzled but the truth of the matter is that you are fatigued 😩at the end of your races and that is when you need those legs to get you to the finish line!🏁

As we said yesterday each of our sets has one or two key words in it to focus on, and if you choose to ignore those than you are just swimming laps and while you may get faster, in the long run taking those shortcuts will catch up to you.  We all learned this from the time we were infants, it started with crawling,walking, running, eating, talking and for an athlete it is no different.  It all comes down to muscle memory be it speed, turns stroke or breathing.

Pay attention to what you are doing in practice and what the sets are designed to accomplish

THE JOURNEY

 

THE JOURNEY

Now that we have been in the water for four weeks it’s time to take a step back and see if we are on the same road for this journey.  We spent the first four weeks working on drills and techniques in all aspects of our swimming and as we move into the next part of our season, the training will increase for our Senior Prep group, and will increase slightly for the Gold and Blue groups.  The drills and technique work will continue but will be included more into the training sets.  Our performance at the first meet last weekend was outstanding, and I believe that we accomplished a lot of good things that we can build on throughout this journey.  As we talked about prior to the meet I wanted our focus to be not on our times but on the things that we had been working on in practice such as streamlines, our dolphin kicks off the walls, breathing patterns, and the way we executed our races especially in our longer events.  As we talked about in the weeks leading up to the meet our focus was to be on execution and not times, a hard thing to do in this sport for sure but still a very important part of the sport that YOU have to learn.  Don’t forget about our talk on the stopwatch and the fact that as you improve and your times get closer to the 00.00.00 the less improvement you will see and this is the hardest part of any athlete’s journey especially those who’s results rely on the watch! The times will be there during our championship run during this journey.  

 

As we continue on this journey there will be bumps in the road as there are in the course of ones life, but how you respond to those bumps often determine your success in life.  In swimming the journey is littered with all kinds of speed bumps such as, but not limited to missing a workout, skipping a set, not drinking plenty of water, not eating properly, poor time management, falling behind in school, and one of the big ones which is not approaching practice in the right frame of mind.  

 

Let’s take that last one and look further.  Are you the swimmer who shows up with a purpose, or the one who shows up with a lot of outside distractions?  We are going to pick on the Saturday Morning group for a little bit here.  Instead of arriving and throwing your bags on the ground and laying down with your phones (a material thing that will be there at the conclusion of practice), maybe a better use of time would be to get ready and do some light stretching on the mats.  The next thing any athlete needs to ask is “Am I doing things CORRECTLY, or just doing them?”  As a swimmer think about it, during a set are you being aggressive on all your walls or just doing a turn.  Are you breathing in and off the walls because to do it correctly takes more effort and is harder? Are you swimming breast stroke without shooting forward with your head and upper body because it’s just takes to much effort and just too hard (Jamie)?  A lot of times athletes will make excuses or blame anyone for a poor performance when all the time THE ANSWER IS RIGHT THERE STARING AT THEM IN THE MIRROR!  Not a sermon, just a thought.

 

As for time management, as we discussed I often hear that swimming takes up too much of my time, but it really doesn’t and as I pointed out on DAY 1, the week has 168 hours in it and (using the Senior Prep as the test case, Gold and /Blue groups are less) you spend a TOTAL OF 7.5 HOURS at the pool during a normal week of training.  That leaves 160.5 hours of a week, which includes about 45 hours for all school work, and 63 hours for sleep (average 9). For you math wizards that a total of 115.5 hours that are accounted for leaving a whopping 52.5 (more than a work week) of free time for you to manage in a productive way.  Learn to do it now as it will set you up perfectly later in life, and remember this fact ALL ATHLETES make sacrifices early in life but all the sacrifices and the lessons learned as an athlete help later in life.  ENJOY THE JOURNEY!