Friday, November 19, 2010

Interesting swim breakthroughs.

Rolled (no pun intended... see below) to swim tonight.. though I REALLY wanted to go to bed. Tom's been gone and I've not been sleeping enough. :(

Our regular coach was busy tonight so we had a sub. He's a highschool swim coach in a neighboring community. Jon was JUST what I needed. We didn't go in and hammer out sets. We did drills... the entire time. It was FABULOUS! We worked a lot on rotation.. also fabulous! He told me I need to swim slower because you can really feel when you do things when you swim slow. WOW! Not that I can work on speed, but I need to spend time FEELING the water.. feeling the balance in the water, feeling the catch and feeling the rotation. When you are FEELING those things you basically sink like a rock when you are going slow.

So what did we do?

1st up:
kick: no board, no fins. Slow flutter kick originating from the upper leg. Arms outstretched in front of you. Lift head to breath then rebalance after your legs sink from breathing.

2nd:
kick: on back, arms at your sides, rotation around the axis going straight through your body. Don't rotate fully to your side. Make sure your hips and shoulders stay in line and keep a nice slow rhythm.

3rd:
swim: use your upper arm to initiate the recovery stage (don't lead w/ your elbows) and have your body rotation bring the arm around and into the water.

4th:
same kick drill above, but practice pushing your buoy to cause your legs/hips to rise. Play with it until you feel like you are floating weightlessly. Not too little push so your hips sink, but not too much causing your butt to pop out of the water.

5th:
kick on side, arms at side. Bring bottom arm up to catch position. Catch and rotate. (both arms back at side, you are kicking on opposite side). Bring arm (under water arm) up to catch position. Catch and rotate. All the way down the pool. Don't PULL w/ your catch arm. CATCH the water and ROTATE.. thus causing your body to move forward over your arm which naturaly flows under your body.

That's all I can remember.

Essentially... BALANCE is key. In the first half of practice Jon was able to take me from a wiggly mess to a nice flowing non wiggling gliding swimmer (I 'rolled', er, rotated. Get it?). I WISH I had had my camera with me to take more video. And I wish he was going to be back!!! I felt like I was getting a lot of what our other coach Rich had been trying to explain. Isn't it interesting how you have to hear the same thing over and over again in different ways before it all finally comes together. (Perhaps this explains a lot about my dad's approach. He is always saying the same thing over and over in a different ways. Could it be that he KNOWS this little thing about people needing to hear things in this manner before we get it. Nah.. I think it's just one of his quirky annoying habits... mom? Thoughts? Dad? Thoughts? You are going to claim that you knew this... at least about me!)

I feel like I didn't do a good job of describing everything we did. I looked for videos briefly, but kids, I'm FRIED. And here we are again midnight and I'm STILL not in bed. Thank god Tom is home tomorrow and I can go back to going to bed at 9:30pm on the dot! Makes for much more pleasurable mornings for all.

Night night!

PS. Only TWO more days until I know about Trakkers!!!! The suspense is just killing me!

10 comments:

  1. That sounds like a good swim workout. I'm going to incorporate some of those drills into my swims, thanks!

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  2. Wait, we find out in 2 days about Trakkers? Where did you get the intel?! Yay, I'm excited! :)

    Anyway, so glad you had some awesome drills! I can't wait until I have the time and reason to start going to masters again!

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  3. Meg.. glad to share. Hope you get some benefit from it.

    Colleen.. the 20th right? Isn't that what we heard?? that's Saturday.. so now it's just tomorrow. :) I HOPE!

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  4. Glad you had a good drill lesson last night! :)

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  5. Thanks for the drill tips! Would love to swim with that guy one time.

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  6. Thanks for the tips on the kick. I get bored with the board and fins sometimes and think I am not doing it properly b/c I just want it over with. Will def incorporate this.

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  7. Sounds like a good swim workout. Yay!

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  8. I have runners kick in the water (figures, not even a runner)

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  9. BDD ... if that means you can't kick for shit then I have runners kick in the water too. I am on the verge of sinking in all of the kicking drills. I swear I go BACKWARD when I hit the middle of the pool.

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  10. Jason... Jon (swim god) said he doesn't really like the kick board/props bc it takes away your ability to work on balancing yourself in the water... which is apparently UBER important.

    Everyone.. so glad you enjoy hearing about the drills. I'm so stoked to share them.

    AT one point I was just looking at the guy in wonderment... he asked me, "why are you looking at me like that?".. I felt like I was looking at the swimming god. SERIOUSLY. I couldn't believe how differently I felt. I was feeling what all the swimmers feel... swimming w/o FIGHTING against the water!! FIRST TIME EVER!

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