Barbell Shrugged

Memphis, TN, feels like home away from home for me. Whenever I have an opportunity, I drive my way there. On top of the list of reasons I still feel connected to the land of Elvis are the friends I made there during the two years I attended Grad School at the U of M. I still have a couple of great, very close groups of friends back in my hometown, and a few ones spread across many states in the US and even Europe and Asia, but the folks I know in Memphis are very, very special to me. Not only are they great friends - those with whom circumstances can make you go several months, or even years without close contact, and when you see each other you pick it back up as if you had never been apart - but they also make up one of the brightest brain collections on earth, equally great for chatting about meaningless topics, or for draining substantial knowledge on areas of interest (training, nutrition, business, lifestyle, etc).

During my last trip there, I was invited to be the guest for Barbell Shrugged, the podcast being ran by the FactionSC crew. If you have not been following it, you're missing out. Although this is only the 9th episode, each one before it has provided a lot of food for thought, along with plenty of funny interactions between the crew and guests. Mike, Doug, and Chris, as well as producers and occasional hosts James Cheney and CTP, all bring in great knowledge in a wide array of areas, and the casual conversation also draws the best out of each guest. This was a lot of fun, and I can say it was a great learning opportunity for me, too. As we dug into the area of strength training, I knew these guys were all capable of providing a lot of good ideas and comments, as they did, regardless of their (lack of) swimming background. I hope people watching can enjoy it as much as I did.

Warning: the casual conversation style of the show also means adult language is used as often as the situation calls for it. It is not over the top, or done with the intention of being offensive, and largely outweighed by the good content, but it is there.

http://www.fitr.tv/swimming-sport-specific-strength-training/

The importance of failing

Plenty of people have written on how failure is part of the development process. Simply put, in order to achieve success, you have to be willing to step outside of you comfort zone, and from time to time that will cause you to fail. What is really important is how you react to failing. Most will tumble, and many will never try again. The success histories we hear about, all involve those who stood up right away, ready to try again!

This swimming season, I was lucky enough to be involved with some failure, and most importantly, with addressing the mistakes, polishing the attempt, and succeeding after another try. The group I work with had a fairly disappointing state meet (with only a couple exceptions). Going in to it, I knew the season had not been good enough, that we had not been training at the level we needed to in order to succeed. In time: I believe this was due to shortcomings from both the kids (who had been successful under a different coaching style before) and myself (who had been successful with a different group of kids). What followed that meet, though, was extremely important and positive: we sat down and talked about our shortcomings. The kids listened to me talk about how we had not been meeting my expectations, and I listened to them talk about what they thought was missing.

I was reminded of a video that has great importance to me (it helped me personally at a time I thought I was 'failing'). You can watch it here.

So what did we do following our conversation? Luckily, we still had one big meet to go, so we got right back at work, and what I saw was a completely different work ethic in action. On my end, I made some small changes on both coaching style and practice design, while on their end they responded by giving me the kind of focus and intensity that had been missing up to that point. With just a couple weeks to train before we started resting, we hit outstanding workouts, one after the other, and by the time taper time came, I was very confident we had done everything we could in the little time we had. The results of our second taper and shave meet were a clear contrast from the State meet, and in many cases the time drops were bigger than they had been for the entire season up to that point! Simply put, I believe we made more progress in four weeks than we had in the 24 before that!

I'm convinced that without the disappointing results of the State meet, we would still be in a limbo, trying to adjust, and perhaps making small gains here and there. Thanks to that failure, we were able to really work together, which resulted in a great leap in performance! Now everyone's looking forward to what the Long Course Season will bring. I have no doubt that we'll be able to keep the lessons learned fresh in our minds, and can only imagine how exciting a full season with that kind of intensity will be!

Lessons from Tennis

I've recently become a huge follower of Vern Gambetta's blog. This happened after a friend lent me a copy of his book "Following the Functional Path." I highly recommend anyone involved with sports (especially coaches) to get a copy of the book and read his blog quite often. They are both full of ideas that will make you question the way you do things. Basically, great food for thought. Ultimately, you will either decide changes are needed or feel even stronger about the way you structure and do things. Either way, you win.

Vern's book and blog are not, however, the subject of this post. In one of the articles from the book (titled 'The System', on page 129) he refers to an article from Play Magazine (NY Times' sports magazine). The article, by Daniel Coyle (author of the best seller "The Talent Code"), is titled "How To Grow a Super-Athlete". Curious, I searched the web after it. The article deals with possible reasons to explain why certain places or clubs seem to produce a high quantity of elite level athletes. Its centerpiece is Spartak Tennis Club, in Moscow, a small tennis club with remarkable success. How remarkable? To quote Coyle's article:

"...this club, which has one indoor court, has achieved eight year-end top-20 women's rankings over the last three years. During that same period, the entire United States has achieved seven."

One thing that stood out to me was the fact that Spartak's 'athletes' are not allowed to compete during their first three years of training! The rationale seems to be that they want to first focus on technique, and don't want early competitive success to get in the way of developing a solid technical foundation. I must be honest: I'd like to be able to pull the ultimate experience, and structure a swim team very much like Spartak structure's. However, I'm aware that would certainly be fated to failure. Generally speaking, copying programs and implementing them somewhere with a completely different culture will never work. The culture of the area where the program was first implemented is one of the things that make it successful there.

So, what lessons can we still take from Spartak and apply to swimming? In one of my previous posts I wrote about how important I believe technique to be in swimming. Reading about Spartak made me feel even stronger about it. While I can't keep young swimmers from diving into swim meets and trying to cut time or win (Oh, the glory of being an 8-yr-old champion!), I can continue to educate parents and swimmers on how technique is a much more important benchmark at certain stages of development. If they understand it and make the commitment to improve it, regardless if it makes them faster or slower today, then they are much more likely to be successful in the long run!

Great Article from SwimmingWorldMagazine.com!

I've again been struggling to find both time and inspiration to write on the blog. I'm actually brainstorming around a topic, so I'll get to it soon. Meanwhile, I just read this article out of Swimming World Magazine's website, and it certainly deserves to be shared! It is amazing how much everyone involved benefit when coaches from different team can sit down and work together to move swimming forward in the whole area.

The article cites a number of situations in which some of the best coaches in the US left their egos at the door, and simply worked together, challenged each other, and made all swimmers and clubs involved better! I also feel the need to remind people of something the article does not talk about: you need get involved at the LSC level! If your LSC gets better, you, your club and your swimmers will have to get better too! Last, but certainly not least, I want to emphasize the portion of the article that reminds how important it is for coaches to have an uncompromising philosophy towards doing what needs to be done!!! There will be times when you will have to go against the will of the parents, swimmers, and board of directors in your team, but you must remember you won't be doing anybody a favor if you choose to compromise.

Now, do yourself a favor and read the article!

Is average good enough for you?

This post has been in my head since getting my GoSwim weekly e-mail update earlier in the week. I had been trying to find inspiration to write something, but struggling to find something that really hit home, until reading Glen's article on Steve Jobs' and Al Weatherhead's life examples and how they can also apply to swimming. He does a great job on showing how these two can inspire coaches and athletes to overcome mediocrity. First of all, read his article! Here's my personal take on it:

In my experience as a swim coach, I have never had an athlete sit down with me to discuss goals and say "I just want to be average". However, I've seen too many athletes paving the path to mediocrity daily during practices. In my last stint of goal meetings, I've asked athletes to think beyond their goals, but to also define, and write down, what they are actually willing to do to achieve them. I've called it an exercise of honesty with themselves.

When people marvel at accomplishments, the path it took to get there is too often overlooked. After Beijing, what made me admire Phelps' accomplishments was not so much the 8 golds, but fact that, according to all accounts, he had practiced all 1,461 days in the 4 years leading to it! The background stories on projects Steve Jobs headed show the same type of intense, relentless dedication to minute details. Basically, there are no great accomplishments without a background of true dedication toward a goal.

Back to swimming, if your answer to this post's title is no, then you need break from the pack, and practice daily according to what you want to achieve. If being mediocre is not your goal (and again, I never heard anyone with that goal), then you need put in quality work that matches your goals! While there are no guarantees to fast swimming and achieving goals, there are ways to increase the likelihood of those happening. This includes quality, focused drills, attention to details (turns, breakouts, etc), embracing and looking forward to pain during hard sets and dryland, and a positive attitude about doing it all again the next day!

How many are willing to practice daily according to the standards they set to themselves? I hope you are one of them!

Technique comes first!

So, first of all, it seems like the swim season is starting to pick up. I say this not because we already had our first meet, but because my last post here was nearly 2 weeks ago! Keeping up with all the coaching duties has been steering me away from being writing. But, finally, here I am!

Our first meet went great. The kids I'm working with were significantly faster than last year at this point of the season, which shows we are set to swim much faster when the season-ending meets approach! We also had about 50% of lifetime bests, which for a season-opener Intrasquad meet is quite impressive! Looking at the bigger picture of the club, the Senior swimmers were also much faster than last year, and the younger age groupers got a higher percentage of lifetime bests, which shows the whole club is improving. Now, that's a good place to be!

Back to the title of this post. Last night, I had to throw away my original plans for practice, and spend a large portion of it revising drills. The original plan was to spend just about 20-30 minutes of practice with stroke drills, and then hit a challenging set. However, it seemed like the swimmers were thinking about racing and swimming fast from the begining of practice, and were just going through the motions during the drill set. While the racing mentality is important, I felt like making sure we understood the drills and stroke mechanics, especially for developmental swimmers, should stay at the top of the totem pole.

Simply put, I had to remind them that swimming is a technical sport. When you are not being efficient, putting more effort against the water will just get you tired and slow you down. Learning propper mechanics just cannot be emphasized enough. Then, this morning I received my weekly GoSwim! updates, and amongst those was a link to an old article Glenn wrote, which deals with the importance of mastering technique first! While the article addresses more directly the importance of having swimmers aged 8 and below to focus solely on technique, I believe it can also help understand why developmental swimmers - and swimmers that haven't even reached HS yet ARE developmental swimmers - should still focus a large ammount of their work on technique. My way of thinking of it is: Technique comes First! It needs to be mastered before any real 'training' can occur.

So, we'll keep dedicating a good ammount of our practices toward drill and stroke work, and I'll keep that challenging set in my pocket. The swimmers can be sure it will hit them at some point, when they are technically ready for it!

Body position on Butterfly

This video from Go Swim! compiles a lot of short snipets at great swimmers performing the fly, during the hand entry phase. They reffer to it as keeping the hands soft at entry, wich is one way to look at it. I especially like the video because it gives great shots at the body position during this phase. Many swimmers tend to enter the water with a 'dive', which drives their hands down and never allows them to get the stretch of the lats, prior to the pull. On the video, you can see how all the swimmers shown press their chest and head into the water, while keeping their hands high in the water, which causes the arms, and especially the lats muscles, to stretch prior to the pull, generating a much more power full pull, due to the use of elastic energy, or the strech-shortening-cycle.