“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