Fall 2024 Week 7 Technical & Conditioning Focus

Fall 2024 Week 7 Technical & Conditioning Focus: October 14 - 20

Technical Focuses:

·      Freestyle: Rotation; breath timing; catch, pull, and recovery.

·      Backstroke: Rotation; catch, pull, recovery, and breakouts.

·      Breaststroke: Recovery—fast hands and foreword lean—underwaters; pop!

·      Butterfly: Recovery, head snap; cheetah speed: loose arms & hands.

Conditioning Focus: IM & Stroke Endurance

Macrocycle: Fall 2024; Mesocycle: Aerobic Preparation; Microcycle: IM & Stroke Endurance*

*These are not always the same, but sometimes….

Hello Swim Families!

Welcome to Fall 2024 week 7!

Okay, we’re almost halfway through it… sorry for not publishing this earlier!

This week, we’re getting spooky! ‘Tis the time of year!

What I mean by that is, Platinum and Blue will level up their resistance training while White and Minnows continue to focus on body position and endurance and kicking.

Before I ramble further, I would like to clarify some swimming nomenclature.

·      Stroke = butterfly, backstroke, or breaststroke.

·      Free = Freestyle (“front crawl;” … also, technically anything the swimmer wants to do if they don’t do one of the few things that can get them disqualified in the freestyle but let me not get further into the weeds).

For those who don’t read the workouts I write, let me provide some clarification.

If we are focusing on a stroke in our main set, which is often the case in Platinum and Blue, that means a swimmer’s best non-freestyle stroke: butterfly, backstroke, or breaststroke. For IM-ers, I often let them switch between the three non-freestyle strokes.

Logically, this raises another question: is freestyle a stroke?

This is where we have to split hairs, because this has a yes and no answer, though it’s really all rooted in language (as someone who has a Bachelor’s in Spanish Language and Literature, I’m a nerd for this… and I also love Tolkien, one of the greatest [Con]Linguists of all time, but I digress).

Is freestyle a stroke?

Yes… but, the truth is, a swimmer may swim any stroke they want in a freestyle event. For example, I won a 50 freestyle once by swimming butterfly.

Freestyle; however, is perhaps more appropriately called “front crawl.” You’ll never hear the Marlins coaching staff call it “front crawl,” we call freestyle freestyle, as the rest of the world does. Nonetheless, as an educator and a huge swim nerd, I feel the need to forward this information to the wonderful community that is the Manhattan Marlins.

What’s more, what is commonly called a speedo may not actually be a Speedo. Let me clarify.

Speedo is a name brand, and when most people think of a “speedo” they picture a brief—the same verbiage as is used in fashion for underwear. The corporate brand Speedo has no doubt benefited from this common association… those darn Australians, they’re also responsible for revolutionizing freestyle (“front crawl”) after World War II.

Oh, boy, I’m about to go on another tangent.

If you didn’t think the world wars could have impacted competitive swimming beyond cancelling a few of Olympic Games (1916, 1940, 1944), I wouldn’t blame you. However, World War II had a profound impact on competitive swimming.

Competitive swimming was thriving between the 1890s and 1940s, and then war broke out. Obviously, it wouldn’t be called World War II if there weren’t a World War I, though World War II placed a much higher emphasis on naval battle as the Pacific was a prime theater of war. This does not mean every great swimmer or coach got drafted to serve; nonetheless, some did. Beyond that, the societal repercussions that follow a global conflict are many, varied, and complex. I can ramble on this subject, but my point is, World War II affected competitive swimming in surprising ways.

According to the American Swimming Coach’s Association’s (ASCA) Advanced Freestyle 12-hour class (yep, I’ve taken it, and it was fascinating), a great deal of information about swimming and swim training was lost due to World War II.

This is not to be conflated with what have happened with the U.S.S. Indianapolis. That said, Jaws is a masterpiece… oh, Quint!

The two decades after World War II represent a time of rebuilding for competitive swimming, which begs the question: if swimming had not lost what it did in the 1940’s, where would it be today? An impossible question to answer, though it makes me wonder.

History lesson over—though expect more in the future.

A further note on kick sets.

Flutter kick with a board is one of the best way to develop capillary beds—blood vessels, essentially. Strong capillary beds equate to increased blood supply to skeletal muscle during intense exercise which is also when O₂ (oxygen) levels decrease and CO₂ (carbon dioxide), H⁺ (the positive ion of a hydron isotope), and lactic acid levels increase. As we know, lactic acid is that tricky thing that makes a swimmer's muscles sore during a race.

I am going to sign off now. Warmup information for the Spooktacular meet in Topeka will be available in a couple of days.

See you at the pool!

-Coach Reid