Blog 1019: Great weekend

Swimmers competed in 3 different gala's over the weekend and performed extremely well in all 3. Coming away with lots of Medals, Speeding Tickets and most importantly Personal Best performances. This is even more impressive given that we have only just started the season and are in heavy training. The fact that you can swim fast whilst doing this lies a lot within the 2 week break, this is a process that all swimmers go through and having spoken to several coaches over the weekend they were surprised we only have 2 weeks as many of them have 3 weeks or a month. The break gives the body a chance to recover after a full season of hard training, so when you do come back to training you are fresh and ready to go. As always there are many lessons to learn from these gala's despite the high level of personal bests. Once again starts and turns come top of the list, the land training will help with this and those that are eligible to do the extra strength and conditioning should really find a way to do this as the starts and turns from those doing it were already noticeably much improved. This is the area where land work helps most. You can also remember to do all your turns correctly in training and when ever you dive in do it properly not just flopping into the pool. Other details we need to work are making sure we warm up correctly and follow the coaches instructions for warm ups (and cool downs where available) in particular when doing Backstroke - count your strokes at RACE PACE during the warm up for both a turn and a finish, and finally nutrition, whilst the club are looking at putting on another talk on this subject you can read the great article from this months swimming times which will help (a copy is on the board at West Park) you need to make sure you are hydrated or performances will get worse during the day, remember you need a minimum of 2 liters a day but more when you are sat on a hot poolside and competing for hours on end. Add these details to your training and whilst in competitions and performances will be even better than they are now.