Wednesday, January 21, 2009

What it looks like... Proper Backstroke Arm Recovery

Proper form during the above-water portion of backstroke (known as the “recovery”) is crucial to developing efficient and powerful technique. The backstroke arm recovery occurs in three phases.

Phase 1: The Exit
Upon finishing the arm pull past the hip, the swimmer should lift the shoulder as the hip snaps up. The arm should follow the shoulder out of the water with the thumb side of the hand leading the way. Olympic Gold Medalist Kirsty Coventry demonstrates the thumb side lead below.














Phase 2: The Rotation
Once the arm is at least 45° out of the water (like the picture above) the swimmer should begin rotating the arm from the shoulder, keeping the elbow straight and the wrist relaxed. The swimmer’s palm thus moves from facing the midline of the body to facing outward. This happens while the arm continues its path of motion toward the water. Olympic Trials finalist and NCAC alum Tim Liebhold demonstrates what the arm should look like at the conclusion of Phase 2.




















Phase 3: The Entry
The final phase of the backstroke arm recovery is perhaps the most crucial — the entry. The hand should enter the water directly above or slightly to the outside of the shoulder with the pinkie first. A common mistake is to over-reach, letting the hand enter the water behind the head. Once the hand is in position, it should slice deep into the water without slowing, setting up for a strong arm pull. The picture below shows proper hand position an instant before a perfect hand entry.













For an efficient and powerful backstroke that is shoulder-safe, be sure to follow these tips for the arm recovery!

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Why Should I Dolphin Kick???

I received the following question in response to one of my previous posts.

Why is dolphin kicking off your walls important? For me, it seems to waste energy and make me even more tired when I continue a race.

It is true that for some people, dolphin-kicking off walls is ineffective at helping them go faster in a race. These people simply haven't developed their underwater kicking ability to the point that it can help them.

One of the core principles of training is that you must train the way you want to race. Develop your skills in practice so that you can dive in on race day and be automatic. Improve your dolphin kicking at practice to the point that it can help you. Make it a habit. Become adept at it. Then and only then will it help you in a race.

It Ain't Over Until It's OVER!

A terrific example of what not to do. The race is NOT over until you cross the line or until your hand touches the wall!!! Celebrate early and you may not be celebrating at all. Finish the race and THEN enjoy the moment!


Sunday, January 18, 2009

Age Groupers - The Coach's Fountain of Youth

This week, with some of our assistant coaches gone on our team trip to Atlanta, I stepped in to coach our age group swimmers for a few practices. Granted, I didn't have the whole group because many of them were on the trip, but it still presented a few fun challenges:

1. Just keeping them in the water. They have this strong desire to climb out of the water at every opportunity, or do an underwater back flip or some other trick that does not involve listening.
2. Tactfully explaining how really good swimmers don't have to get out of the water to go to the bathroom every practice.
3. Telling a joke of the day where they don't already know the punchline. I got beat to the punchline for "Where did the cow go with his girlfriend on their first date?" both times I told it. By the way - it's "the moooooovies."

At any rate, coaching the age groupers was an enlightening experience. I am reminded about the learning process, and I have to rethink how I give instructions for a set. Sometimes they inspire new ideas. For instance, tonight I came up with at least half a dozen ideas to use at senior practice just by watching how the age groupers swim. Their mistakes remind me how vital it is to develop good habits at a young age, so that when this 10-year-old in front of me gets to the Senior I group I teach him the subtleties of race strategy rather that repeat the not-so-subtle nuances of streamlining off the wall.

I also love how the 12 & unders are not encumbered by the weight of the expectations of others, for most of them are just there because they love to get faster. They also love learning new skills instead of looking at you like they already know everything. It's so refreshing, it's like a fountain of youth for my coaching enthusiasm.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

The Athlete's Improvement Curve













This is a simple model that can be helpful in understanding the long-term development of a swimmer. The scale on the left side represents the athlete's competitive performance. The scale on the bottom represents time over the span of the athlete's swimming career. Along the top, the dashed line signifies the athlete's ultimate potential. The three lines represent the Improvement Curves for three different theoretical athletes. Their trajectories follow three distinctly different paths, starting from roughly the same point.

Athlete 1 (bottom curve)
This athlete experiences moderate improvement early on in his career. Perceiving himself to lack skills that might make him a good swimmer, he mostly participates in swimming "for the exercise" or because his parents make him or both. Though he enjoys swimming, he is not highly motivated to get faster. He listens to his coachesat practice, but never really commits to making technical changes. His parents are only slightly supportive, believing that as long as their son is staying active, his activities are serving their purpose. Consequently, they only drive him to practice twice a week when he is 10 years old and only three times a week when he is 14. He does get taller, stronger, and more athletic as he grows up, and this means he does get faster, though at a much slower rate than his peers. His improvement flattens out in his teenage years as he enters high school. Competitively he lags far behind his same-age peers. He has no idea what his potential could have been because he never really made a strong attempt to find out. Athlete 1 represents the lower extreme of competitive swimming experiences.

Athlete 2 (middle, stair-stepping curve)
This athlete experiences an improvement trajectory quite different from Athlete 1. He too experiences improvement early in his swimming career. One of the key differences in Athlete 1 and Athlete 2 is that Athlete 2 perceives that he has some true ability. This occurs because he has a coach that believes in him, because he beat many of his peers at a meet, or because his parents encouraged him. He becomes highly motivated when he sees the connection between the work he does at practice and his own increased performance. After a string of steady improvement that may last for years, he goes through a rough patch where he doesn't improve with each swim or hardly at all. His improvement curve flattens out. This might happen because his workout attendance suffers, because his technique is limiting his performance, or maybe just because he is getting older. Eventually though, he gets back to near-perfect attendance, he and his coach figure out his technical glitches, or he gets taller and stronger. This leads his improvement to kick back up again, and soon he is dropping time again. This cycle of improvement and plateau repeats itself in varying time spans and for varying reasons for the remainder of his swimming career. He comes to understand that the stair-stepping pattern is part of the process. He takes failure in stride and looks forward to working toward his next success. Because of his persistence and enthusiasm, he enjoys his experience and succeeds in reaching high levels in the sport. Athlete 2 represents the broad majority of swimmers with a wide range of potential.

Athlete 3 (top, steepest curve)
This athlete experiences a meteoric trajectory over the course of his career. He experiences rapid improvement as a youngster. Immediately tapped by coaches and teammates as a prodigy, he is perfectly motivated from a young age. His parents take him to practice every single day and never have to convince him to go. He improves regularly even if by small amounts, and never has a meet where he doesn't go all best times. He does this by continually adapting and improving his technique, and never letting his motivation flag. As he grows taller and stronger, these physical adaptations exponentially magnify his improvement to even higher levels. Eventually, he becomes an unbeatable winning machine. Athlete 3 does not exist.

The reality is that nearly every swimmer follows an improvement curve that is similar to that of Athlete 2, depending on his natural talent, work ethic, commitment, and a host of other factors. More on the Improvement Curve in a later post.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Coaching vs. Managing Practice

In my experience, there are a variety of ways that coaches go about running their practices. We all have our funny ways of doing things, and we each have our own style. What seems to me to be a common thread among successful coaches is that they don't just manage the practice, they coach it.
It may seem like semantics, but let me explain. Truly coaching practice means teaching, encouraging, correcting, disciplining, instructing, and demonstrating. In short, interacting with your athletes in a way that makes practice productive, fun, and successful. Sometimes I see coaches fail to coach practice and instead they manage it. Often, this coach is working with more athletes than he or she can handle, is under-prepared for practice, or is coaching athletes who swim at a level beyond the coaches' skills or maturity. This coach spends his or her entire time just making sure the athletes are doing practice. But in my view it's not just the "doing" that makes the athletes successful. It is the doing, the learning, the motivating, and the interaction that makes a coach-athlete relationship at practice successful.