Although not quite Practice + Pancakes, it’s the next best thing. After capturing P+P with the Tennessee men, I stayed to watch postgrad and Commonwealth Games bronze medalist (50 fly) Ryan Coetzee‘s solo workout. Looking at the progression of an elite swimmer, it goes: club team, where you’re pretty much forced to do whatever the coach wants, college team, where you have more specificity in your training but still restrained by what the team may need from you, and postgrad swimming, where you swim for yourself, and you train exactly the way your body needs or wants to be trained. We got a taste of that with Ryan’s underwater workout.
Coetzee, a native South African who swam collegiately for Tennessee, focuses on the 50 and 100 fly, so his dolphin kick is arguably his most powerful weapon. We see him perfecting it in this workout which was as follows:
5x
4×17 underwater kick with toys, work on feel (the bulkhead was set at 17 meters)
4×17 maintain kick count (11), maintain speed within each round, Descend by round
34 float
Cool music. Felt like I should have been playing Mario Kart