During winter break we move our practices to 7am so we are able to get in and out early instead of having to go in the middle of the day. Occasionally we have swimmers traveling or committed to family, but otherwise everyone is expected to be there. I try to make these practices a little different than everyday practices while still getting in good yardage.
Warm up – 400 swim
Kick – 8 X 50s on your back leaving the wall every minute on the minute
Pull – 400 (with or without paddles)
Main Set – complete 8 Snakes… on the snake the swimmers will dive off the lane 1 block and swim down that lane, then cross under and go up the next. They will continue this for all 5 lanes completing 125 yards each time. At the end they hop out, do 10 squats, and then walk back to lane one and start again.
After our main set I wanted to take the time to work on dives. We have several swimmers this year who are pretty new, and I wanted to go back and reteach some dive techniques (even for those who are not new).
- LEAD FOOT – swimmers paired up and, standing behind their partner, gave them a nudge. The partner being nudged will then catch themselves with their lead foot. This is the foot they should lead in their track start off the blocks.
- START JUMPS – During this exercise I have the swimmers take a track start stance, tuck their chin, and on my que, they spring up vertically making sure to stay in a tight streamlined position.
- INEXPERIENCED GROUP – I held a pool noodle out in the water and talked to the swimmers about visualizing, tucking their chin, and diving over the noodle.
- EXPERIENCED GROUP – we worked a tight streamline and a proper breakout
- RELAY DIVES – lastly, we worked on relay dives. In each lane, one swimmer swam in from the halfway point, and another swimmer performed a relay start. We focused on reaction time. I plan to cover this more and more as we continue into the season.