Stuttering progress

It feels like a bit of a mixed week for progress back towards swimming.  On the positive side Milton Country Park has now started to open for a test event and many have taken advantage of the great facilities at Box End in this beautiful weather.  On the negative side Swim England have announced cancellation of all National Swimming events in 2020 including both open water and indoor meets.  I know this is a big disappointment for many of us that love to compete and also have a focus for the swim side of our training outside of multi-sport events.  But I know we are a pretty resilient lot and there are likely to be plenty of other opportunities so we just need to get creative.  Nike’s recent advert is a little bit American but I did think it was quite good for helping us remember how we can use our sporting experiences for the positive.

In the Saturday Swim session this week we are going to focus a bit more on mobility, strength and conditioning rather than cardio as many of you will be starting to some cardio exercise in open water.  For the core set we are going to go back to Caleb Dressel’s Corentine #2 circuit that we did a few weeks ago (it is the easier one of the two we have done) so check out the video below for a refresher.

See you Saturday!

Rob

Open Water Returning

It’s exciting to hear that some open water swimming venues are now open (Box End and TriFarm) and some of you are taking full advantage.  OK, it’s still very early days and places are very limited but it is positive progress.  Adding this opportunity to those of you that have managing tethered swimming in your garden or a dip a local river then we are seeing more people gradually getting back in the water.  We are also making plans for our return to Impington as you will have seen from Matt’s recent email.  No news on dates or numbers yet but it is good to be making progress towards this.

The Saturday session this week will help us continue with our plan to be stronger and more mobile when we return to the pool with some more stretching, strength and conditioning work.  We will be doing a Tabata style main set this week, which reminds me of the intestity we try and hit in the USRPT fast 50s we do in the pool.

Please do be careful in all the land training and work within your ability.  I know some of you find some bits challenging and are picking up slight injuries so please do work within your limits.

See you Saturday!

Rob

Motivation

Did anyone see some familiar faces in the Cambridge Independent this week?  If not you can read it online here on pages 60 and 61.

There are some interesting stories about sport in lockdown including Helen’s comments about the three ingredients to motivation – competence, connectedness and control.  I hope that with our regular dry land swim sessions from Tim, Heather, Helen and myself we can increase all three of these areas.  Your competence for the exercises we are doing should be increasing, we are as connected as we can be online and hopefully you feel in control of the time and effort you are putting into these workouts. This should all help with your motivation to get stronger ready for our return to the water.

In the session this week we will be doing a set that has a few more swimming strokes – including a bit of IM especially for Juliet – which is inspired by some workouts by a very good US open water swimmer Lexie Kelly.  No equipment required this week.

See you Saturday!

Rob

 

 

 

Better Imagery

Did any of you try writing an imagery script based on the video I posted from Helen last week?  I did.  I wrote one to focus on improving my pace judgement in a 400m time trial.  It wasn’t as good as it could have been and Helen kindly gave me some tips on how to improve by writing a template.  And she has kindly said I can share it with you to help anyone that wants to write and practice an imagery script as part of their preparation for getting back to swimming: Imagery script template

I hope you enjoyed the slightly different warm-up we did last week, which was based on a mobility routine from the pro Ironman athlete Laura Philipp.  We are going to do her core workout routine for part of the session this week and you can see what it is in the video below.  It is in German but with subtitles and you will see that you need some basic equipment to do it, specifically:

• A small ball, such as a tennis ball
• A band, and
• A light weight such as a light dumb bell or large filled bottle of water

See you all Saturday!

Rob