Visualizing improvements

How did you like the video I posted last week about stroke improvements?  I really like this video.  It is a great example to watch and the analysis goes through all the main areas where we can all make improvements in our technique.  One of the techniques that many athletes use to improve both technique and race performance is imagery (also called visualization or mental rehearsal).  A very good Sport Psychologist, who I am particularly fond of, tells me there is a lot of evidence that it has a positive impact on performance, particularly in swimming.  And the great news is that imagery requires little more than a pencil, paper and some focused time and effort, which many of us can achieve in the current time.

So how do I go about doing some imagery?  Here’s a video to get you started:

In the Saturday Swimming session this week we will be doing another one of Caleb Dressel’s core circuits for the subset before we go into the main set.  Check out the video below to see what we will be doing:

The main set this week will be based on some shorter intervals so we will be looking for a bit higher intensity to get the benefit.

See you Saturday!

Rob

Building momentum for our return

One of the things we can all do to help prepare for our return to swimming is to think about the improvements in our stroke we want to adopt when we get back in the water.  A very good video analysis on what makes a stroke very effective is the one below by Brenton Ford at Effortless Swimming.

It is packed full of great advice on all key aspects from body position, kick, pull and stroke timing.  I would recommend spending some time watching this, and watching it again, and trying to identify what area you will focus on when you get back in the water.  If you want to practice key aspects of the stroke then you can use stretch cords for a bit of technique practice before pools re-open.  The following video has some great tips for doing this as well as how to make your own stretch cords.

For the Saturday session this week we will be doing a couple of sets of the Traithlon Taren core workout shown below followed by a new variety of our main escalating density circuit we have done before.

See you Saturday!

Rob

Corentine

This week we are going to take inspiration from Caleb Dressel.  For those of you that don’t know him he is an astonishing sprint swimmer.  He is a double Olympic gold medalist and also won more than thirteen gold medals from swimming world championships.  He holds the 100m Butterfly world record (long course) in a time of 49.5 and 50m Freestyle (short course) world record in a time of 20.24.  Yes, that is 2 lengths of Impington in 20.24 seconds!

So we are going to give one of his recently posted core workouts a go during the session this week.  Watch the video below to get a feel of what we will be doing.

We will be doing an Adam Peaty inspired main set as well after a usual good warm-up.  See you Saturday!

Rob

Adapting and finding the positive

I don’t know about you but I didn’t realise how much I would miss the chlorinated water of an indoor pool.  I am so looking forward to swimming properly again.  But I also didn’t guess how well people would adapt to the current situation.  I loved the video article by Non Standard on the BBC website about her 14 days of quarantine in a hotel room in Australia and how she adapted her training and found the positives of broken AC becoming an unexpected opportunity for a heat training camp.

Closer to home many of you will know how we have bought a paddling pool to try and do some tethered swimming. I have to say Helen and I were a bit disappointed when we tried it and realised it just wasn’t quite big enough to swim in using a tether.  However, we have tried again and found ways to use it successfully by doing drills and pull workouts with our feet dangling over the edge.  It is not perfect but I have to say it feels great to be back in water and doing something to complement the dry land training.

For the Saturday training this week we are going to go back to the high intensity 10 minute circuit set from a couple of weeks ago following by a subset focused on our posterior chain courtesy of one of the recent Global Triathlon Network videos.

See you Saturday!

Rob

The Peaty Attitude

I have written about Adam Peaty before as I think he has a great attitude to training and racing.  In the past week he has released a tweet about what he is doing during this Coronavirus.  One of the bits I love about this message is his approach to the lock-down as an opportunity for “momentum to build into next year” together with the practical things he is doing to achieve this.

I’d like to take some of this approach into the session this week together with some of the swim-specific dry land exercises he refers to in his resource pack.  If you want a preview of some of the exercises (together with some other great resources) you can find them here.

See you Saturday!

Rob