SwimSwam wants to give you an inside look at what a normal day-in-the-life looks like for any given swimmer, and how that differs from team to team or city to city. We send our head of production, Coleman Hodges, to be a fly on the wall at practice, then relay what he discovered back to you over pancakes. Or at least breakfast.
The SwimSwam Southeast Pancake Tour of 2019 is completed, and now we sit back and reap the benefits. Namely, we get to see what all these teams are doing at their practices. With the Pro Swim being hosted in Knoxville, it was a natural fit to start with the University of Tennessee. Head coach Matt Kredich is known for thinking outside the box and masterminding some pretty innovative technique work, which we saw on full display in today’s practice.
They started with dolphin dives during warmup, which I think we can all agree is every swimmer’s dream. The coaching staff found that it had buoyancy benefits for swimmers, allowing them to feel their body position in the water as they’re breathing in and out, which is good for warming up and getting into your technique for a practice. After some drill work, they started with a turn progression, focusing on tempo-ing up into the turn, something the staff had noticed hadn’t been a strong point in their competition the previous weekend. They hit another weak point in their team performance (changing gears during a race) by hooking up to a bucket and swimming 25’s where they built to a fast tempo.
For the last part of practice the team split into stroke groups, and we took a look at the breaststroke group, which did a set of 100’s in which they could only take 4-5 strokes per 25. Which was just plain fun to watch.
Stroke tempo is very important. I always use COUNTU Tempo as my swimming metronome. Easy to use and can work as timer and lap counter also.
Super cool! Thanks!