WELCOME BACK

Happy Monday!  We hope all of you had a great break the last few weeks, a chance to refresh  both physically and mentally from a long four months academically and swimming 🏊‍♀️ environment.  It was great 👍 to see so many of you make that sacrifice during the holidays and find time to put in some training sessions in the pool. We put in some good work in the pool with some long aerobic sets and some sprint training sessions mixed in.  We had some great sessions working on our underwater dolphins off the walls, and we spent a lot of time learning the crossover turn in the IM.  Although we still have a lot of work to do with them, the strides that we have made in this short time have been amazing 😉 

A lot of you have asked should you use it in a meet, and the honest answer is that it’s an individual choice, but with that being said by no means should you use it during an important meet.  We’re to ready yet, but it is okay to try it for the meet this weekend.  I see both advantages and disadvantages to using this turn at this stage of your developmento.  The biggest advantage is that if you can really master this turn now it will be something extra to put in your tanks and take with you to the next level in your swimming and something you will have throughout your high school years.

Another advantage is maintaining your speed into the wall. As you know this is easy to do with your flip turns but the open turns are entirely a different beast.  As soon as you touch that wall your forward progress STOPS.  With this turn there is no grabbing the wall. Don’t forget the steps; hand to the wall, push the wall, chin to knees, feet to wall and push.  

The disadvantage that I see is one, will your pullout in breaststroke suffer and two, it’s risky and not something our stroke and turn judges see a lot.  I truly believe that for the 100 and 200 IM it’s a great thing to have in your tank to use.  As for the 400 IM not sure if the need for oxygen is more important than advantage of any speed that is gained.  Still reading about it and I want to get Damien thoughts on it.  As with anything this will be a work in progress.

This week we will put a lot of work into our stroke counts and maintaining them as we work on some easy speed sets as we gear up for the IMX meet at the end of the month and the qualifiers in February.  Let’s keep up with the school work as you wind down the semester, stay ahead of it.  Stay hydrated with lots of 🚿 , wash those hands and let’s try and stay healthy.