Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Swimming Faster - Stroke Rate

Looking back on our season, one of the best techniques we worked on was stroke rate. In hind sight, we should have done even more with it. I know we tapped into the potential, but we didn't utilize it to it's full potential.

Basically stroke rate is how fast you are moving your arms. It is the same as RPM (rotations per minute, but we call it strokes per minute, SPM). The more SPM you take, the faster you will go. Typically swimmers will tend to have too low of a SPM or the SPM will break down during a race. There is also a break point on the high end as well. When your stroke rate goes up too high, you start to lose the feel of the water and your speed will decrease.

The key is first making sure you have good technique established before you work on SPM. The best tool for the job is the Tempo Trainer by Finnis. It is basically a waterproof metronome. You set it for the tempo you want and either clip it on your goggle strap (with a clip provided) or tuck under your cap. We found it is easier to tuck it in the cap. From there the idea is to match your SPM to the beep of the tempo trainer. We found that the swimmers were able to increase their SPM and maintain that tempo during races.

If you don't have a tempo trainer, but have a metronome, you can always use that at the end of the pool. Just make sure to keep it dry!

More on this later.

DA

Friday, April 25, 2008

Pool Upgrades


We are in the final planning stages of of a number of upgrades to our pool. Mount Holyoke's pool was built as a 25-meter pool and a separate 40' X 60' diving pool. The diving pool has been great for our divers with a separate and dedicated pool for their practices. It is also kept a couple of degrees warmer than the swimming pool.

The one challenge was the swimming pool was 25-meters, which is counter to the NCAA swimming in yards. This is now going to change shortly. Thanks to a very generous donation, we will now have a fixed bulkhead to make the pool 25 yards. In addition to the bulkhead, we are also installing new Paragon blocks, replacing our Colorado Timing System and upgrading our scoreboard to a 10 line LED board. We are also painting the walls during the project.

We will start draining the pool on May 7th, the day after classes end. We expect to have all of the work completed by the middle of June, just in time for U S Sports Camps swim camps to begin.

This is a very exciting time for the team and college. We are also looking forward to hosting a number of meets for outside groups!

These renovations will make Mount Holyoke's auditorium the premier facility in Western Massachusetts.

All the best,
DA

Monday, April 21, 2008

Relay for Life

The Team participated in the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life on Friday and Saturday, April 18-19th at Amherst College. The relay is the 6th annual event for the 5-colleges. Over 1,000 people participated and the event raised over $125,000 for the ACS! Our team of 11 raised $1,600l.

We were fortunate enough to have beautiful weather for both Friday and Saturday and everyone had a great time.

Certainly, one of the most poignant was the survivor lap at the beginning of the event. Watching a couple of students participate in that lap certainly puts life and all of it's challenges in perspective!

I hope to post some pictures from the event in the next couple of days.

DA

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Swimming Faster

Just like the mantra in real estate - "location, location, location", to swim faster it is technique, technique, technique!

As your speed in swimming increases, so does the resistance from the water against your body. Unfortunately, the resistance increases exponentially! So it literally becomes much harder to go faster as you go faster!

The challenge then is to make your body as efficient as possible. This comes through working on technique as much as possible.

I believe most coaches spend too much time having young or inexperienced swimmers swim laps for conditioning, which often forces them into bad habits. It is a much better use of a coaches time to work with drills to teach technique. Of course you are also working on conditioning at the same time.

What is the easiest measure of efficiency in swimming - STROKE COUNT. Count how many strokes it takes for you to swim a length of the pool. From then on the goal is to lower that number as much as possible. (You can go slower by taking too few strokes, but most swimmers do not have that problem.)

So the next time you are in the pool, count your strokes to get a base line of how efficient you are at each stroke. Then start to work on lowering that number.

More later!
DA

NEWMAC Sportsmanship Award

This is the second year in a row the Mount Holyoke Swimming and Diving Team has won the conference sportsmanship award. (which makes sense, since the award is only in it's second year!)

The award is voted on by all of the student-athletes in the conference and is given to the team that shows the best sportsmanship during the conference championships.

This is a great honor for the team and a reflection on how we run our program. We want to compete and win, but do not believe we can also show great sportsmanship at the same time. It is something we talk about from day 1 in the program and it is clearly paying off!

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Welcome to the new MHC Swim Dive blog

So, this is the first day of the new blog about Mount Holyoke Swimming and Diving. The space will include a variety of information that family and friends will find informative and entertaining. I look forward to posting team information as well as pictures and video in the coming weeks.

Best,
DA