Hell Week

I grew up with a fear of Christmas break or as many swimmers call it "Hell Week," as we would start adding up our yards (laps) in the hopes of going further than any team in recent history.  That turned into a sick appreciation of having gone through a swimming ritual that every swimmer must go through and as I made the move to a coach, I even began my career passing many of those fears and workloads on to my swimmers.

 

I have changed.  Unfortunately, I have understood how training works on a scientific level for quite some time, however, we are creatures of habit, and what worked for me, or what my coach did, must be the right thing to do, right?.  Stepping out and changing something is much harder than falling back on what most do.

Also, I got to a point where my teams were coming out of the Holiday's so tired and worn out that they were not able to swim practices at a high level, getting sick, accumulating injuries, and their overall health was taking a hit.  It seemed like we were taking the month after the Holiday's just trying to get to taper, rather than being in full control and executing some great workouts.  It is important to know that my teams were willing participants, we were all on the same page, as we were doing what everyone else is doing, so it must work, right?

If you are a coach or a parent heading into the Holiday's, think about these things:

1.  "Tough" practices can be completed, but you also have to give them time to adapt and recover from those practices.  Mental Toughness is always used to justify these practices, however, the athletes mindset turns to just completing these sets which is much different than the race itself.  Be mindful of what you are trying to accomplish with your team.  How a set is swum is much more important than how far or how hard it is to complete.  If work is too hard, an athletes ability to recover will be impaired, negating the possible benefits of the training effect. Unlike a type of fatigue that develops training effects, these holiday sessions often push far past the benefits of any desirable training effects.

2. Take time to teach over the Holiday's.  There is so much that goes into fast swimming and there are so many things to fix when I watch a typical high school or college swim meet.  Use the extra time to teach something, fix something, teach your team to do something better.  Now is the time to teach proper mechanics on the starts, turns, stroke mechanics, how to warmup, warmdown,........

3.  The logic behind these holiday camps are often explained with anecdotal evidence that claim to test a swimmer’s limits physically and mentally. It should be noted that often what a coach says and what is completed at training is not necessarily what is done by the swimmers (Stewart & Hopkins, 1997).

4. It should be noted that there has yet to be any scientific literature that promotes the idea of drastically changing a training plan due to a holiday. Coaches must remember that the objective of training is “to progressively and systematically increase the training stimulus to induce superior adaptation and, as a result, improve performance” (Bompa, 2009).

Twitter Coach

I came across this piece from Verne Gambetta's blog on how John Wooden was using the twitter concept before twitter was even possible.

In a well run swim practice, you don't get to talk to every athlete at the same time very often.  You are communicating in 10-45 second intervals and repeating yourself often.  Think about the Que words you are using to get the message across.

I also like the statistics on what Coach Wooden was communicating, only 6% was praise, another 6% was discipline, while 75% was information.  How much information is going into your workouts and to your athletes?

                                                      

Thursday morning Practice 11-21

This morning we had another great set I thought I'd share.  The team performed very well on multiple levels.  The goal was an aerobic endurance level workout, but broken up so that the team could still feel like they were swimming well and at a good rate.  I was very pleased and even though we were not completely focused on how fast we were swimming, the team was performing at a very high level.

All the freestylers swam together today, from 50-1650's, which we do on occasion.  The sendoff's weren't as important as was controlling their speed and the quality of their swims.  A good number of the team chose to use a combinations of fins & paddles on the 100's and we saw some very good swims.  Our top men were holding 50-51's, while our top women were around 55-56's

The IM and stroke set used a broken 200 to get their heart rates up, keep their strokes together, and keep their speed on the higher end.  We were not adding up time, but almost everyone was close to in-season best times.  The middle set worked on keeping the heart rate up with some 100's and an IM, followed by an opportunity to descend some 75's stroke. 

The main sets took between 50-55 minutes.  I did not include the warmup, but we stretched on deck plus 1000 yards of warmup.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Morning

All FR

1 X 300 @ 4:00/15 (last 100, :05 seconds faster than 1^st 2)

1 X 200 @ 2:30/45 (steady effort, continued from last 100)

1 X 100 @ 1:10

1 X 300 @ 4:00/15 (last 100, :05 seconds faster than 1^st 2)

1 X 200 @ 2:30/45 (steady effort)

3 X 100 @ 1:15

1 X 300 @ 4:00/15 (last 100, :05 seconds faster than 1^st 2)

1 X 200 @ 2:30/45 (steady effort)

5 X 100 @ 1:20

1 X 300 @ 4:00/15 (last 100, :05 seconds faster than 1^st 2)

1 X 200 @ 2:30/45 (steady effort)

7 X 100 @ 1:30

*100’s are best effort, may use fins & paddles.

All IM

X + Y + X + Y + X + Y + 2X

X  = fast 200 IM broken as follows:

1 X 75 @ 1:00  (50FL/25BK)

1 X 50 @ 45 (25BK/25BR)

3 X 25 @ 30 (1BR, 2 FR)

Y =

3 X 100 FR @ 1:10/15

1 X 200 IM @ 2:30/45

4 X 75 stroke @ 1:15 descend 1-4

*limit the rest between sets to less than :30 or none

Stroke

X + Y + X + Y + X + Y + 2X

X =fast broken 200 stroke as follows

1 X 75 @ 1:00

1 X 50 @ 45

3 X 25 @ 30

Y =

3 X 100 FR @ 1:10/15

1 X 200 @ 2:30/45 (steady pace)

4 X 75 Kick @ 1:20 descend 1-4

Monday 10-29 workout

We had another very strong swim workout yesterday afternoon that I wanted to share.  It was meant to push the length that we were swimming at very high speeds.  We have been building the amount of threshold or what we call "cruise" speeds all season, and this pushed the total volume along with the length of time they were holding fast repeats.  They were swimming very fast for 9 minutes at a time (with rest) and 4 minutes of EZ swimming:

Warmup was about 1500 yards, ending with some 25's where we got the heart rate up to be ready to go.

I called these Indy 500's. the pattern I got from an old Mark Spitz set I saw, but I made it work to what we wanted to adapt to.

5 Rounds with a 200 @ 4:00 between each set:

1 X 25 from dive @ 30 (asked them to jump off the cliff, and go fast, get the heart rate up right away)
3 X 50 Kick @ 50 holding best effort they can, most of our team was under 40
3 X 75 Swim @ 1:30 holding our threshold paces or better (my top men's group was all under 40's, and top women were under 45
1 X 100 w/ fins & paddles @ 2:00 trying to go under best times.  We want them to use a bigger engine with the fins and paddles and finish feeling fast, and still working really hard.  We had a few men going under 50 and a few women under 55.  In the future, I may be more selective with the paddles as some of our team at our level, cant keep a high enough tempo.  We shall see.

The entire set takes an hour, very productive for our team.  Where it fits into our training schedule, we did an aerobic endurance set Monday morning, this set in the afternoon, and then no morning practice today, with short (05-10 sec) high velocity swims tonight.

STAY STRONG! Your test will be your test-imony, your Mess will be your Mess-age.