Dear all,

It is so excited knowing that you all will be returning to campus starting this week.

Having said that, most of you should also know that swimming pools in general are allowed to reopen and once I receive confirmation from both EDB and the school that our pool can be accessed by the swim team for training, I will let you all know at once.

In the meantime, I stongly recommend that if you have access to pools, please start conducting some swimming and if you need some swim sets, do not hesitate to contact me and I will custom make one up for you based on your ability. In addition, keeping active with some dry land workout will also help you get back in shape.

During early stages of returning to the pool after a long lockdown, here are some keys to focus on:

Head Position

Often times, no matter who you are or what stroke you specialize in, freestyle is the stroke we swim the most in workouts. It is used in warmup and cool down sets, along with being sprinkled into some main sets. With that, it is imperative that after a break, you spend a great deal of energy on getting your freestyle back in fighting shape. The easiest way to do so is to make sure your head is in the right position. Many times, when we lose feel for the water, we become unbalanced, when we become unbalanced we tend to try and compensate for it by lifting our heads when we swim and breath. It is our brain’s way of keeping us from drowning. So how do you fix this? By keeping your eyes glued to the bottom of the pool. This will naturally bring your hips and feet closer to the surface of the water, creating less drag and allowing you to swim faster, with less effort.

Sculling

When we take a significant amount of time out of the water, the first thing to go is our feel for the water; a strange yet essential concept to swimming at any speed. When we don’t “feel” the water well, we cannot swim fast. Sculling allows us to slow down the motion of feeling the water and pay attention to where we can feel the most amount of water at different points in our stroke.

Underwater Dolphin

After taking a long break, it can be very hard to hold your breath long enough to take more than just one or two (if any, let’s be honest) dolphin kicks off each wall, especially in a short course pool. Paying attention and committing to taking several dolphin kicks off each wall will not only build your aerobic base faster but it will also ensure that you don’t lose that skill. Underwater dolphin kick is often referred to as the fifth stroke and, just like any other stroke, it can come and go without diligent practice.

Quality vs Quantity

While this is a mindset we should always have, it is especially important when coming off a long time away from the pool. Just like the tips mentioned above, it is crucial that we focus on the technical aspect of our strokes and turns before trying to take on a heavy amount of distance. A way to incorporate this into your personal training regime could be to try only doing a single swim workout a day, while adding in some dry land, in order to not overload your body with more than it can handle.

Patience

As the itchy competitors we all are this trait is hard to come by. However, being patient is the key to overcoming the frustration of not being able to do what you used to be able to do pre-vacation. You may think that as more time goes on, and the more you swim, the quicker you will be able to get back where you were and swim as fast as you were able to. While there is some truth to that, it is difficult for the body to adjust to swimming fast after being back in the water a short time. This is true because your body temporarily forgets how to process glycogen and dispel lactic acid. It takes time for the body to get used to completing these natural processes, as efficiently as it used to be able to, when you were in tip-top shape.

It is often assumed that for every one week you take away from the pool, it takes one week to get back to where you were. This is actually a fallacy. The more accurate rule of thumb essentially forces us to take double the time we have taken away from the pool to get back in fighting shape (one week out = two weeks in, etc.). The most important thing when coming back from a break is to be patient and remember what your long-term goals are. This can help ease the process and make each day more purposeful.

I sincerely hope that the situation continues to improve and without too much delay our in house training may resume.

Look forward to seeing you all soon.

Regards

Coach John