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.
At the last practice of our 2019 Southeastern Pancake Tour, we followed 2 groups in Tuscaloosa. The first was the mid group, coached by assistants Chris Collier and Angie Nicolletta. After their warm up and and a kick set, they hopped into 4 rounds of 3×50, 2 at race pace and 1 easy. As Collier explains in the video, these are not only meant to hit race pace for their short events, but also meant to be swum as they would in the race, thinking about turns, under waters, and finishes.
In the sprint group on the other side of the pool, Jonty Skinner had his athletes putting on all sorts of equipment to try to get their muscles a little outside of their comfort zone. This included paddles, fins, buckets, and my personal favorite, weighted wristbands. There was a myriad of short sprints involved, as well as some kicking, but the focus was still highly technical with the “hydro freestyle” (as seen in our first practice with Bama) stroke very much in mind.
Collier seems to be doing some good things with that distance group. Excited to see how they do at conference!