Time trials

It is time for our second set of time trials this Winter.  Normally for these second set of time trials we would have started some speed work during January but I’ve delayed the start of speed work this year to give us more time on technique – mainly on the breathing and kick.  So this set of time trials is the ideal one to really focus on making it technically as good as possible and seeing what that does for your time, stroke length and stroke count.

I am a firm believer in only focusing on one thing at a time so suggest thinking about just one key thing per length, such as:

• Good early vertical forearm on the first length
• Quick breathing on the second length
• Good legs on the third (continuous but not too fast or too much effort)
• Fast turns with good streamlining on the fourth
• Repeat 4 times to complete the 400

See you Saturday!

Rob

Kicking on

Well done for all of you efforts last week with the quicker breathing.  I saw some excellent improvements in stroke tempo and heard that some of you also felt the increase in power in the stroke.  This week we will be doing a little bit more on the quicker breathing as well as done some work on the legs.  Using your legs well has a similar benefit to good breathing and really helps with the rythm of your stroke (as well as removing the brakes if your kick is poor and affecting your body position).

In the kick set this week I’d like you to think about the following:

• When kicking try and keep your legs straight, with toes pointed, and kick from the hips. Your knees will naturally flex a bit when you do this but you should resist letting this happen as it almost always results in excessive bending of the knee which just increases drag and slows you down.
• A great way to check your legs is when kicking on your back without a float, but always remember:
  • Never, ever, kick on your back with your arms by your sides – always keep your arms above your head in a streamlined position
  • Keep your knees under the water at all time – the only part of your legs to break the surface should be your feet
• When doing full stroke your legs set the tempo for your arms. Hence, a great way to avoid over-reaching on your pull is to focus on keeping a steady tempo with your legs which will make it impossible to pause on your arms stroke.  A pause in your arm stroke is almost always accompanied by a pause in your leg kick.

We will also be doing some sprints at the end of the session this week and this is another great opportunity to work on your legs.  Again, the legs set the tempo for your stroke so focusing on a really fast, hard leg kick will naturally increase your stroke rate without you feeling the need to rip your arms through the water and start slipping water.

See you Saturday!

Rob

Breathing, take II

This week we will be doing some new drills to focus on breathing and especially the timing of the breathing.  This is really important to try and get right as it really affects the quality of your EVF catch every time you breathe, which is one of the improvements that many of us could make.  Please watch the following video for details of some of the drills we will be doing this week:

This is one of my favourite videos that Chloe has done as it is so packed full of excellent drills and some great examples of both what it looks like when you get the timing wrong and what it should look like when you get the timing right.  I see quite a few examples of the errors in the catch caused by slow breathing on Saturday mornings week so please do play close attention to this video and especially the drills demonstrated on breath timing as we will be doing them this week.

See you Saturday,

Rob

 

January Plan

Well done for all of your efforts in the pool leading over the last few weeks.  I know many of you found some of the front crawl drills and different strokes challenging but I have seen some excellent improvements from many of you with the hard work you have put in.

Normally in January we start the build-up to the new season by starting some speed work.  This year, however, I plan to delay the start of the speed work until February to give us a bit more time to to focus on the technique improvements we’ve been working on over the Winter.  We will do a bit more work practising an early vertical forearm – since this is the one thing most of us could do more of to improve our speed and efficiency – but also do a bit of work on other aspects like head and body position.

We will stick with the usual pattern of doing time trials every 2 months – on the last Saturday of the month – and the next time trials will be at the end of January.  We won’t be doing any speed work before then so any improvement in your performance is most likely to come from technique. So please focus on your technique over the next few weeks by getting a good lever, with an early vertical forearm, to push yourself forward from a strong core rotation.

See you Saturday,

Rob

Emails

Apologies to those to of you who didn’t get my email announcing the change of time for the session last week.  I know some of you were not checking your emails between Christmas and New Year but others did not get the email at all.  Iain is continuing to look into the problems with emails that are not getting through, and I will try link my blog posts to Facebook so there is a another method of notification, but you can also check for all club emails that have been sent from the club website.  If you log into the the members area and go the the “Welcome to your club/communications” page then you can see all the emails sent to the allmembers email link.  Also, if you want to follow just my blog posts you can click the “Follow Rob’s Swimming Blog” link on my blog page or follow me on Twitter (@sivadbor) to get tweets when there are new posts.