SUMMER SWIM AND ATHLETIC DEVELOPMENT SWIMMING STRONGER LTD | JULY & AUGUST 2022

What Is Athletic Development and How Does It Benefit Swimmers?

Coaches look at particular attributes, called athletic abilities, in order to monitor an athletes progression. These abilities include qualities like strength, power, balance, flexibility, muscular endurance, coordination, agility, and many more. Swimmers are athletes! While some of these athletic abilities are more important to swimming performance than others, developing swimmers will see the greatest long-term potential when they improve their athletic abilities. The more athletic someone is, the more adaptable they are. Improvement in sport is simply adaptation.

We're also not built to swim! Human beings are built to run long distances and throw. That means that we need to create an athlete that can handle the demands of the sport by training both in and out of the pool. By adapting the body to meet the demands of swimming, we can ensure greater long-term potential and a reduced risk of injury.

Our athletic development training will consist of teaching the fundamentals of strength & conditioning in a safe, age-appropriate way, improving movement patterns, improving athleticism, and having fun doing so!

Will Swimmers Be Lifting Heavy Weights?

Nope! Our work will be done in an open gymnasium, not a weight room. Swimmers will be introduced to light forms of resistance training through body weight calisthenics, resistance tubing, and at most, light medicine balls & kettlebells. They'll participate in other exercises that encourage the development of their athletic abilities using equipment such as skipping ropes and agility ladders. The focus of our program is teaching efficient movement patterns that encourage structural balance in the body.

Is It Safe?

Absolutely! Our training actually makes resistance training safer! My goal is to provide athletes with the fundamental skill to be able to progress their abilities over the long-term. This means not loading movements unless a degree of technical proficiency has been shown. The reason we load movements (add resistance in the form of weight) is to engage a specific adaptive response. Our focus is on teaching movement patterns so that when swimmers progress to the point that they add resistance, they're able to safely perform the necessary movements in order to achieve the desired adaptation. Education is a huge part of what we do. An educated athlete is an engaged athlete, We make sure to progress resistance in a safe, controlled, and monitored way through age and skill appropriate training and education.

What Will My Swimmer Gain From This Experience?

• The ability to perform movement patterns more efficiently
• An increase in the performance level of certain athletic abilities
• A basic knowledge of athletic abilities, safe movement patterns, and the fundamentals of resistance training
• A basic understanding of the adaptation process

How We Train In The Pool

We Focus On the Fundamentals

Every elite athlete, great athlete, and even good athlete are all built on stable foundations of proper movement patterns that become the basis of every muscle action that they use in their day-to-day sport specific movements. Building an athlete is exactly like building a house. Without a proper foundation, you're not going to have a stable house, and slowly, you're going to experience problem after problem. When athletes progress too quickly without mastering these fundamental abilities, they get injured, plateau, and fail to maintain longevity in their sport. We focus on teaching foundational skills and building training programs based on sound, well researched scientific principles. Our goal is to educate our the athletes that we work with so they can work on their skills outside of our clinics. No fluff, just fundamentals.

We Break Down The Stroke Into Tangible Components

We build each stroke from the ground up using part-training methods allowing the athlete to understand the different movements involved in the stroke, how they effect each other, and how to put those together in order to achieve technical efficiency. Doing so allows athletes to focus on improving specific components of their stroke before putting it back together.

We Swim Skills at Speed

We're working with competitive athletes. What good is a skill if it can't be accessed under pressure? Swimming our skills at speed after we've broken down the stroke proves that the athlete can access these skills during a practice or race settings when they need them most. It builds the athletes confidence that they can translate these skills on race day. It teaches athletes to repeat these skills under pressure in order to click save on their skills.

We Click Save On Our Skills

We provide opportunity for the athletes to click save on their skills. Athletes are smart and adaptable. They can perform a wide range of skills under perfect conditions, but can they perform them when it counts? To make sure that our athletes click save on their skills, we educate them, ensuring an understanding of WHY it will improve their swimming.

We Provide A Visual Learning Tool

Most people are visual learners. In swimming, we often rely on auditory cues and kinesthetic awareness. At our clinics we provide athletes with video footage of the skills that they worked on. By doing this, swimmers can review their stroke, deepening their understanding of their own performance.