And speaking of competitions…

The Kishwaukee YMCA in DeKalb, site of the 2008 ILMSA State Meet, won the bid again to host the 2010 State Meet. The meet will take place on April 23-25, 2010 (start getting your entry cards ready now!). There was a big push to get the meet pulled out to the Western Suburbs again. Kishwaukee YMCA did a nice job in 2008, albeit at a much smaller State Meet turnout than we get when it runs at UIC.

In keeping with the discussion on the technical swim suits, here’s an article from the November 3rd “Wall Street Journal,” Some Aging Competitors Call High-Tech Swimsuits Dirty Pool.

It kind of rehashes a lot of the discussion that we’ve already heard over the past year or so, but it’s a decent summary in the context of US Masters Swimming. The suits do give an advantage to swimmers because of their added buoyancy, streamlining of the body, and shaved-body-effects without the shaving. I guess what I can say is: If you care about whether you are the winner of an event, you might want to look at putting up the money because your competitor will probably be wearing one until they are banned. If you are competing against yourself, don’t bother because you really wouldn’t be the owner of those seconds that you dropped. It’s up to you.

As I was digging myself out of an email blizzard after being gone for a couple of weeks, I found this message from Rules Committee Chair, Kathy Casey on the USMS policy on swimming suits. If you own a racing suit, take a gander at the note below. You can take a look at the June 1st statement for details.

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The FINA Masters Committee has recommended that the FINA Bureau, meeting in mid-January, approve its recommendation that Masters swimmers be governed by the same swimsuit rules as the elite pool swimmers. If the Bureau approves the committee’s recommendation, it is anticipated it would go into effect after the Bureau meeting. If this recommendation becomes policy with the FINA Bureau, USMS will implement it for our sanctioned swim meets.

For the time being and until the FINA Bureau issues its policy for Masters, the June 1, 2009 ruling that allowed technical suits in USMS swim meets is still in effect. If you choose to compete in a USA Swimming sanctioned meet, you must follow USA Swimming rules.

If you would like more information on purchasing technical suits, you may contact your swimsuit dealer or any of the following:

blueseventy; blueseventy.com
FINIS; finisinc.com
Speedo; speedo.com
TYR; tyr.com

When I was in Florida last month for the American Swim Coaches Association annual convention, I met some great coaches and had a chance to exchange some ideas. Out of these meetings came the idea for the Holiday Fitness Challenge, a way of keeping ourselves in shape over the holidays, raising some money, and to bring a broader group into a raffle at the Holiday Party.

The way this will work is you will choose an amount of yardage that you think you can complete between Sunday November 21st and the Hour of Power on Sunday December 20th. Pick a challenging number so you can push yourself a little bit. We’ll kick off the Holiday Fitness Challenge with a longer practice on Sunday November 21st to start padding your numbers. We’ll then head out to brunch because we’ll earn the extra calories that pancakes will bring.

To get in the game, you’ll buy in for $20 and get 1 raffle ticket. You can buy additional raffle tickets for $20.You’ll track your yardage over the month to see how you are doing with your goal. If you exceed your goal by December 20th by 15%, you’ll earn another raffle ticket. If you do the Hour of Power, you’ll earn another one. The more you swim, the better your chances of winning the prizes.

The proceeds from the raffle will go to a charity to be announced. We’ll have more information on the raffle prizes and how we’ll track the information in the coming weeks.

I thought this would be fun way to structure our swimming over the month of holiday parties and colder weather. Plus, it will keep you focused on looking good in a swim suit for your holiday vacations.

If you aren’t a member of the team, and you are just reading the blog, but you’d like to take part in it to keep you honest, shoot our office an email at info@chicagobluedolphins.com and we’ll figure out a way to support you.

Sorry that this post came in late…

We do sets called “stroke elimination sets” periodically in practice. These are sets where we start off with a base stroke count and ask you to take strokes off the count when you swim. We do these sets as a way of getting you to concentrate on your technique and form. By cutting out strokes, you are having to figure out ways to control your form to get more out of each stroke. For those will very high stroke counts, it’s also a way for us to communicate to you that you don’t need all those strokes to be successful.

Here are some examples of stroke elimination sets:

4 x 25 @ :10R — #1 @ Base, #2 and #3 @ Base-1, #4 @ Base-2
4 x 75 @ :15R — 25 @ Base-2, 25 @ Base-1, 25 @ Base
4 x 200 FR @ :15R — 1st 175 @ Base, Last 25 @ Base-1

In each of these sets, you’re asked to adjust your stroke to be able to achieve your stroke count target.

Here are some strategies to doing these sets well:

1) Start with a Good Base Count — Make sure you start with a base count where you are moving with a pretty decent speed (probably about an 80% effort). If you start swimming with perfect technique, you’ll probably already be swimming slowly and with a lower stroke count. To take strokes off that count will lead you to start drilling rather than swimming.

2) Slow down and rely on good body position and timing — Slow down both your speed and tempo and focus your attention on swimming with better balance and side streamlining, leaning forward and making sure you get to full extension on each stroke; these changes will help you cut through the water with less drag. Also work on your timing. Time the catch on your lead arm to start when the other arm recovers past your ear. We call this swimming “taller” because you spend more time in a long, tall position and transition quickly to another tall position when the hand passes the head.

3) Set your catch and drive past your hand — Another way you can take strokes off is by getting a little bit more power out of each one. Work on getting your forearm positioned with a good catch and then drive your top side past your catch point. As you put more pressure on your catch and more power into your drive forward, you’ll feel more glide in the stroke.

4) Slow down your Tempo Trainer — Another variation of this set, if you use a Tempo Trainer, is to methodically slow down your stroke rate and maintain the flow in your stroke. If your normal rate is a stroke per second, drop the tempo to a stroke every 1.1 or 1.15 seconds. Stretch out more into the stroke and work our catch as in #2 and #3. If you don’t add any pause into your strokes, you should start to see your count go down.

5) Work your walls — Another way that you can take strokes off your count is by doing a better job streamlining off the walls. Stack your hands, tighten your core, point your toes, and squeeze as you come off the wall. Maintain that position as you come into your first stroke. Keep your head down for the first stroke or two so you get some momentum going with your stroke before breathing. If your body is passing the flags on the push, you are doing it well. Having said this, if you body hits the surface and you kick for another 5 yards, that’s what we call cheating.

Hopefully these tips will help you and you will know what to do when your coach tells you to cut two strokes off the next 25.

I was at a fitness expo this weekend, and I got into a conversation with one of the trainers at Hi-Fi Personal Fitness about some complementary kettlebell classes this month. They will run on Monday October 19th and Monday October 26th at 7am. The classes will be about 45 minutes long and complimentary. The classes are normally $25 for 1 class or 10 for $200.

The kettlebells are cool because they do all-body fitness development. They work strength, cardio, and flexibility all at the same time. The instructor is a Level 2 RKC Instructor which is apparently a top of line certification.

Hi-Fi Personal Fitness is at 1030 North Ave. Suite 300. For questions, you can contact chicagokettlebellbootcamp@gmail.com or at 312.342.5712.

Check it out and see how you like the class and the location.

A variation of this practice will run on Tuesday October 6th in the 50 meter pool at UIC.

Like last week, we’re working on feeling our T-pace and working at a faster pace. This time, we’re going to be working a pace that will push you up toward your anaerobic threshold (heart rate somewhere in the neighborhood of 180). Here is the morning practice for the Level 3A’s (the fast folks):

• 400 FR @ 5:20– Hold T-Pace (or 3 x 100 pace if you don’t know)
• 2 x 50 Kick @ :55 – Fast kick
• 2 x 100 FR @ 1:20 – Hold 4-5 seconds faster than T-Pace
• 400 FR @ 5:20 – Hold T-Pace
• 2 x 50 Kick @ 1:00
• 3 x 100 FR @ 1:20 – Hold 4-5 seconds faster than T-Pace
• 400 FR @ 5:20 – Hold T-Pace
• 2 x 50 Kick @ 1:05
• 4 x 100 FR @ 1:20 – Hold 4-5 seconds faster than T-Pace

Hopefully you did your T-Swim last month (and put forth a good effort), so you have a pace that is an accurate reflection of your current fitness level. We’ll do 3 x 100’s in Warm-Up #2 if you didn’t, but it’s still better to have your baseline pace be from a 20 or 30 minute swim.

We’ll go through cycles of a longer swim, here a 400, where you are trying to simply hold your T-Pace throughout. This intesity should be light. The Level 3’s will follow the 400’s with 2 x 50’s kick, starting at a fast interval and getting slower. The kicks are in there to sustain the intensity and to get your legs warmed up for the 100’s. The 100’s are going to be at 4-5 seconds faster pace than your T-Pace, but held on the same interval. We’ll go through 3 cycles of that with the number of 100’s going from 2, to 3, to 4 at the end of the set. The set’s designed to be pretty challenging.

The Level 2’s and 1’s will follow a similar pattern, but they will do drill/swim 50’s to reset their balance and length after the high intensity swims. The pattern for the 2A’s are shown below:

• 2 x 50 Drill/Swim
• #1@ 1:30: Side Balance
• #2 @ 1:00: FR – Swim long and balanced – very easy pace

To get the whole workout for Level 3, 2, and 1, you can go to the Sample Practices page of our website and follow the link for the 10/07/09 practice.

This practice should be pretty challenging, so have fun with it and go to work (or bed) knowing that you put forth a great effort.

A group will be getting together to watch the Bears play the Cincinnati Bengals at Hawkeyes (1458 W. Taylor St.) on Sunday October 25th. Kickoff is at noon, so you can head over after the Sunday practices. Have some food and drinks, hang out with your teammates, and marvel at the fact that Cedric Benson seems to finally be making a career out of it.

We’ll send an Evite around shortly so we can tell the bar how many folks will be showing up.

I thank Steve Tarpinian and his webinar “Swim Myths” for inspiring and providing some of the information in this post. I get asked a lot by my swimmers is they should swim with paddles to get stronger in the water. I’m not a big fan of this strategy mainly because I’m a teacher and paddles can cause injuries. I worked with newer swimmers and I work on teaching good pulling form. I haven’t experienced that paddles do a great job of teaching good pulling form nor do I like the risk of shoulder injury that comes to a new swimmer using paddles incorrectly.

Paddles come in all shapes and sizes and they certainly will increase the resistance and the load on your arms when you pull. The problem is that depending on the size and shape of your paddle you can cause some major shoulder problems. If your pull is not perfect, the added load, the tendency to pull out of synch with the body, and inefficiencies in your pull pattern (e.g., dropping the elbow, wide outscull at the catch, pulling across the midline, dropping the lead arm on the breath, outsculling too strongly to turn the hips to breathe), can lead to or exascerbate swimmer’s shoulder, or tendonitis. Worse still, trying to fit the resistance might start building one of these inefficiencies into your stroke. The trouble with paddles is that these problems might not happen this year, or the next, but they will eventually happen.

I’ve tried using paddles during swim lessons at the Swim Studio, and I’ve never gotten the results I’ve wanted. You can still drop your elbow like a champ when you are wearing paddles. You can start pulling too close to the surface and “short-stroke” the finish with paddles. You can still drop the lead arm during the breath using paddles. The problem is that with the added resistance, you still feel like you are catching a ton of water when you pull. I’ve used paddles with a couple of students successfully by slowing down their tempos to ridiculous levels (1.8-2.0 seconds per strokes) and used the paddles to slow down the arm so they could feel their hips turn with the arm. I’m still not convinced that this is the best way or only way to achieve this result.

I’ve gotten the best results teaching the high elbow catch using the good old-fashioned windshield wiper scull and the catch-up drill. These drill exercises can be integrated into the full stroke without affecting the shoulder muscles. Since you don’t have the plastic paddles on the hands, you don’t lose the feel when you transition to the full stroke.

As far as “getting stronger in the water,” a better route is to find a trainer who can create a strength development program specific to swimming where you can build strength and power to support the swimming motions. You will get stronger with the added benefit that you will be using the right muscles to initiate the motions with better core support for the shoulder. So long as your trainer know what he or she is doing, you can also get this added strength without the risk of injury.

Also, don’t discount the value of spending more time in the water. Water all by itself provides a great deal of resistance. If you go from 1-2 days in the water to 3-4 days in the water, you can get stronger simply by doing more swimming. Also learning the other strokes can also work the swimming muscles in different ways and put you in different energy systems. Many of the “strong” swimmers you see got to where they are not because of using paddles but by swimming 6-10 practices a week and doing dryland exercises.

Now, paddles are used in a large percentage of club, high school, collegiate, and triathlon training programs across the country. I’m sure that there are a lot of coaches who disagree with me and that’s their right to do so. I just saw too many friends of mine take up soccer, track, and tennis as kids because they shredded their shoulders using paddles too much. As I said above, if you have an excellent pull and you are in good shape, paddles can help to develop strength. I don’t know if it’s worth the risk and rehab time to find out that your pull is not as good as what you think.

As we insert learning flip turns into practice, we, the coaches, are starting to hear from our triathletes: “I don’t need to learn flip turns. I’m a triathlete. There are no walls in open water.” Many of these same triathletes take pride in the fact that they don’t push off from the wall, thereby working harder by swimming more between walls.

Yes, Virginia, it is true that there are no walls in open water every 25 yards or 50 meters that you can push off from (if you are lucky to swim in long course). However, it’s equally true that you don’t stop, go vertical, grab a huge breath, and restart from zero every 25 yards or 50 meters in open water.

A flip turn with a good, streamlined pushoff helps you preserve your momentum, making your swimming more continuous like it would be in open water. Furthermore, starting each length from a good, streamlined body position sets you up better to return to swimming in a balance, streamlined, long body position. Finally, flipping your turns adds an element of breath control to your swimming, challenging you to manage your air flow to get in and out of the wall without running out of air. (Note: For the newbies, it will take a few weeks for your body to adapt to the change in air flow, but it will assuredly get there). The end result of your flip turn and streamline pushoff practice will be an increase in overall pool speed which can help you move up a lane or go to a faster interval — something we all want.

We’ll be working on flip turns and streamlined pushoffs on Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings at the UIC Technique practice. We’ll sprinkle in some work in the mornings at Moody as well, mostly on Fridays. Head to our website to see our Masters practice schedule and our pool locations.