Have you played this memory game?  Maybe it’s an old game to most of you, but to the swimmers that travelled to Gainesville in our team truck on December 1, they had never heard of it.  I couldn’t believe it, so I taught it quickly to them.  Keep in mind these are athletes from ages 13-17 and may or may not want to do something like this.

The game is designed to be a memory game where you say “I went to the store and I bought a….” and you go around the car and the kids have to say all the items in alphabetical order before them and then create a new item for whatever letter we’re on.  No problem, right?  Well, Let me tell you, swimmers play for keeps, no matter the competition. It’s cut throat, no mess ups were aloud and a short time limit to think about it was not long, maybe 1 minute.  As time drew to a close, everyone would sing the Oompa Loompa song  from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to absolutely further confuse the player.

We had 8 people in the truck and started the clockwise motion around the vehicle. Almost everyone made it through the first few rounds, but then people started to forget and fall off. Then another, then another. Finally it was down to the 14-year-old Koko and myself.  It was tough! We actually made it through the first 26 rounds (yes, we went through the entire alphabet!) and even started the alphabet over before we called it a tie.

So just the other day, I asked Koko if she remembered the entire list (keep in mind this is 16 days later without discussing it at all!) I received this text:

I went to the store and I bought, asparagus, bananas, cat poop (don’t ask me–why!?), donkey, elephant, ferrari (can you buy one of these at the grocery store?), giraffe (not in this country), hat, igloo, jaguar, kangaroo (again, maybe Australia), lemons, mangos, nutella (good stuff!), orangutan (??), pie, quilt, rest stop (I still don’t get this),  sucker, tazmanian devil (it must be a pet store/grocery), umbrella, violin (only on Sundays), worcestershire sauce, x-ray (maybe at WalMart), yorkshire terrier, zoomba videos (for my wife)–now to numbers, 1 appalachian mountain (I still don’t get their thinking), 2 original flavored ramen noodles, 3 monarch butterflies.

I can’t believe she just hammered them out like that 16 days later!  Are you kidding me?

So a couple good learning lessons here. Good game, great memorization skill, makes the boring car ride a little easier to bear, and fun times trying to confuse players by everyone singing at the top of their lungs!!!!  We also played 20 questions, but that is a whole other story, let me tell you!

So how is this applicable to swimming? Try team-building!  Oh, and that other little thing called competition… yes!

Different coaches may have their own reasons, but mine is quite simple and easy to understand. After a decent fall season with the age groupers, a week or so break, I normally like to jump back on it. This time, the timing was right-mid December. So we got back on the training, at least for the next 3 to 4 weeks or so. You can follow it in the workout section of swimmerjoe to see what’s going on.

My immediate reasons for it are getting the young athletes swimming harder than normal, building up some pain tolerance, and creating a very solid foundation. Most coaches do this, if athletes and dedicated, they normally have a love-hate relationship with this time of the year or training cycle. My main reason is this: to have the ability to swim higher quality sets in late January and February for the last of short course season. This will give us the ability to do this and create some real crazy speed! It really works, I have done it for years.

There are many different ways to do things in training and get ready to swim fast, and this is one of them. Let me know what you guys do. I am always curious. Have a great season!

The deadly silence was creating a eerie feeling in my mind, but I knew there was something going on that was more than epic, things that were unbelieveable and heart riveting. An event was playing in my mind over and over, something that I worked on for months, years in fact and this was the final time it would play. A last march, a point of ecstasy, a final destination.

I look up, see the end, water drips from my chisled chin. Then I heard a command that felt extremely soothing, yet scarey, “Take your mark.”

I heard a water droplet at the end of the pool hit the tile floor 80 meters away, as if I was by myself in a huge warehouse. Then we were off.

I hit the cool 78 degree water and felt like a slick missile from a nuclear submarine speeding through the ocean trying to get to the object first. “How simple is that? Just get there first, before anyone else.”

I felt great, pulling through with ease and creating a little distance between me and the other speedy missiles. I should; I grew up being taught by the best teachers in the world, the meanest, the smartest, the most strategic. Flip turns were absolutely perfect. I always wanted to be the world’s fastest on the walls with the largest plus sign in the universe.

On the way back to my launching pad, I took a quick peek and saw that I was in the lead at the point–just now I hear sounds, muffled noises, lower voices, louder cheers and yelling. They were looking at me, at the lucky person in the middle lane. The noise was almost deafening now, it was hard to think. I kept my head and nose down to drown out the distracting sound.

I touched, I looked both ways, no one was here yet, I must have won, I clearly won. Oh my gosh, the noise! My ballistic heart rate felt like it was beating from the outside. People were congratulating me, looking at me on the big screen. I half smiled and immediately thought about all my insane coaches and family sacrifices that got me to this unreal moment.

“Johnny, Johnny, get up! You are going to be late for practice,” my mom yelled. “What the heck was that?—Dayum!” I said. “What was what?”

Bummer, off I go.

Another day to turn this dream into a reality.

Young swimmers got to watch some of the nation’s best swimmers through the entire race process — what they do mentally and physically to get ready to race. They got to see what the A and B Final swimmers look like while swimming backstroke, head position and tempo, or the timing in breaststroke with the efficency and glide is absolutely invaluable!  So let’s talk about the Pre, Race and Post race pieces that we observed.

Watching Race Prep
Watching the A and B Final swimmers conduct their race prep is probably what gives them an edge from all the other less experienced swimmers. Beginning with a good warm up and then getting by themselves, mentally going through the race in their head, visualizing (see old post), and swinging and stretching their limbs for maximum speed. What that also does is prepares their muscles from a physiological standpoint. For more information, check this article out. This one is from 2002 and for cycling, but it has all the same principles that apply to swimming. Physiology and your muscles

Most young athletes really don’t know what to do and oftentimes they talk and run around right before events.  You know what? The more the young athletes practice their meet prep and spending the effort to do so, the more powerful the process and therefore the more focused, and obviously a better and more ready the athlete is! So get practicing with race prep. By the way, it works. I told one of my athletes just this month to start working on it and get your head in the game…What an absolute turn around!  It works.

The Race
The Junior National swimmers showed it this weekend. Plain and simple, training takes over. If you have been training to your expertise or your best efforts, the race will take care of itself. So, listen to your coach, focus on technique, and develop your strength and stamina during practice.

Post Swim Care
We coaches state that warming up and warming down are key to great swimming and the longevity of the body as well as onging performance. But how do we really know this? USA Swimming put out a great article about the art of recovery, check it out! Who knew sprinters needed more swim down than distance swimmers? Watching the Junior National swimmers go directly to the warm down even before speaking with their coach was a good lesson for our young athletes. 

Swimming multiple events at multi-day meets are very taxing on the body and young athletes need to realize that.  The swimmer with most “in the tank” both physically and mentally on the last day will and should prevail everytime.

After this fast weekend at Junior Nationals our swimmers learned a great deal.  Hopefully you can also spread this knowledge throughout your team and develop your own “team Pre, race and post strategy” for greatness.

Let me know how your team or your athletic pre, race and post race has changed and how you have worked on it.  I’ll post it here on the blog!

We now have 3A up under the Results Tab and the High School Tab.

by SwimmerJoe

Thinking of you high schoolers. This is the night before the BIG ONE.

Night of fear
Night of excitement
Night of team
Night of sweat
Night of not sleeping
Night of shaving
Night of apprehension
Night of stress
Night of selective thinking
Night of visualization
Night of silence
Night of boredom
Night of waiting
Night of dreaming
Night of winning

Roll over, get the hotel wake up call

Morning of carbs
Morning of slickness
Morning of queasiness
Morning of worry
Morning of intense worrying
Morning of excitement
Morning of readiness
Morning of warming up over and over
Morning of heats
Morning of praying
Morning of giving it the fight of your life
Morning of dreaming
Morning of crying
Morning of the big one
Morning of the rest of your life

Smile and go rest in between

Night of epic proportions
Night of speed
Night of swimming out of your mind
Night of slow motion
Night of noise
Night of extreme stress
Night of fear
Night of bathroom breaks
Night of silence
Night of explosiveness and power
Night of elevated heart rate
Night of unbelievable performances
Night of records
Night of my life

Do it!

Related articles

• Florida Age Group Championships – Day 2 and 3 Recap (swimmerjoe.com)

After focus, the world’s greatest athletes list visualization as the next most important aspect of their mental training. The importance of this is definitely a must! You have to see yourself being great. I can only speak from my experience, but visualization was huge for me in swimming and other sports that I participated in. (Yes, I was Middle School Champ in wrestling, too!)

In swimming, I would visualize over and over, and over and over again, just to do it absolutely perfect in my mind. I would know how I was going to start, how the stroke felt, how fast the turns were going be, when to breath, on and on until I touched the wall and saw the clock with my best time! Bedtime is the perfect time to practice this…What you can do is relax your body and start from the beginning of your race with how your body feels, the air, the sounds, what you hear and have the special event in your empty relaxed mind. You go through your pre-swim ritual in your head, the stretches, the breathing and the preparation of your event. You see yourself starting swimming and pulling through the water with 100% effort and efficiency….then you glance up at the wall and are extremely overjoyed by the numbers you see on the scoreboard. If you believe you can be the best you can be, if you can actually visualize yourself excelling at your sport and feel the power through your visualization techniques, your will be one mean, powerful and unstoppable athlete!

If you are just training hard that’s great, you will get benefit from that, but if we also add the focus component and visualization technique you will start becoming an even greater well-rounded and more complete athlete. The focus and the visualization probably are worth 50 – 60% of the entire picture, so don’t go on much longer without it. I don’t like giving people a 60% advantage over me doing something and I assume you don’t either! Practice this every night and you will start noticing a difference by mid November…..Let me know how it goes.

Monday November 7, 2011

30 minutes circuit dryland…keep up baby!

5 x 100                        1:20                  Swim
50, 100, 150, 200    :55 base           KICK – down all out, back moderate
(x2)

3 x 300                        1:25 base        100 IM, 100 IM, 100 IM
4 x 25                           :30                   No breath DPC
50                                  1:00                 ALL OUT CHOICE
3 x 200                        1:25 base        100 IM, 100 IM
4 x 25                           :30                   No breath DPC
50                                 1:00                  ALL OUT CHOICE
3 x 100                        1:25                 100 IM
4 x 25                          :30                    No breath DPC
50                                 1:00                  ALL OUT CHOICE
200                              TIME                 Stroke – Broken at 50 with :10 seconds
15 x 100                     1:10/1:15         4 on fast interval, 1 on 1:30

Try to do the swimming in 1.5 hours…gotta stay busy people!

Let me know how you did.  This is a great workout for heart rate, keeping your heart rate moderate while, increasing speed.

Need a workout? Why don’t you try this one on for size? This was a workout done by the Blue Dolfins Age Group athletes on Saturday, November 5, 2011.

Enjoy and let me know how you did.

12 x 50 :40 every 4th backstroke

300 3:45 Free
3 x 100 2:30 IM
3 x 100 2:50 KICK
3 x 50 1:00 Descend, stroke
(3 x)

Fins
6 x 50 1:15 37 ½ under, 12 ½ sprint
6 x 25 :25 underwater shooter
4 x 25 :40 All out choice

9 x 50 1:00 boys under :25, girls under :27

4 x 400 5:15 Paddles and Buoy, long, breathing every 3 strokes down, every 5 strokes back

Let me know how you did. Tell me your sets or workouts and we will post them! Bye for now, train hard!

#1—While daily consistency is one key to swimming success, so is performing your strokes in proper form the entire practice. Getting lazy builds bad habits and those are extremely hard to break…it is better to slow down, change intervals, and get in a slower lane to do the strokes to the best of your ability. You will eventually get faster with what you are doing, and guess what? You are doing it in proper form!

#2—Continue to monitor your stroke count per lap to see where you are. You may think you are doing strokes with extreme efficiency but your stroke count tells you differently….stay the same stroke count per lap as best you can. One of my old teammates, Anthony Nesty (pictured below), who coincidentally is also an Olympic Champion in the butterfly, swam an entire difficult practice swimming only butterfly while keeping the same stroke count each lap…..and it was long course!…..I guess the proof is in the pudding!

Always think about form.   Efficiency always wins in the end!

Anthony Nesty