Competitive Kick Set

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Ryan Woodruff
Head Coach
Lynchburg YMCA

Swimmers partnered up.  For the first part of the set, they push their partner (who is in a streamlined position) with one hand.  Then they race their partner in an all out 100 flutter kick. The 100 was handicapped based on a “best average” kick set earlier in the week, meaning that one partner got a head start over the other.

More Fr/Bk Tech Work

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Ryan Woodruff
Head Coach
Lynchburg YMCA

More free and back tech work. Archer drill for free is one of my favorites: Pause with one arm extended in front, and the other hand paused with a high elbow mid-recovery. For Archer 1, pause just after the hand exits the water. For Archer 2, pause with the hand hanging loosely near the shoulder. For Archer 3, pause with the hand above the water in front of the shoulder, just above the water.

Fly Set

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Ryan Woodruff
Head Coach
Lynchburg YMCA

I can’t wait for our season to start on Monday, so to keep the blog going until then, I am reaching back into the archives a bit.  This workout is from my days at the North Carolina Aquatic Club in 2010.  This is a SCY workout that we did about two weeks before we attended Junior Nationals.

Backstroke Parachutes Set with Back/Breast Follow-up

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Ryan Woodruff
Head Coach
Lynchburg YMCA

This workout goes back to 2009.  It was written for SCY for an athlete who was an Trials-caliber backstroker and IMer.  The focus was on underwater kicking and backstroke strength.  The “yellow” parachute was rather small and the “1st black buoy” refers to 15m mark from the opposite end of the pool.

Example Goal Sheet

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Ryan Woodruff
Head Coach
Lynchburg YMCA

Our team is currently on a break, so I haven’t been writing any workouts to post lately.  I hope you have enjoyed the different posts over the last few days.  Here is another one that isn’t a “workout” exactly, but I hope you will find it helpful nonetheless.

Here is a copy of the goal sheet I have given my swimmers for the upcoming season. Over the years, I have seen coaches use a variety of approaches to goal setting. My approach has changed a bit from year to year as well. If you are willing to share your process, I would love to hear how you and your team do it.

10 Creative Ideas for Your Practices This Season

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Here are some of our recent posts that will put a unique twist on your workouts:

1. The Deck of Cards Practice
2. The Best Idea I Ever Had (or Stole)
3. The Hot Lava Set
4. Asking for Feedback
5. The “Wet-land” Challenge Set
6. The M & M Set
7. Blind Goal Workout
8. Stopwatch Roulette
9. Let’s Get Funky
10. The ? Set

And just in case…

…19.5 Ways to Get Better Even When Practice Gets Cancelled

10 Awesome Distance Workouts

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Here are some of our recent most popular distance workouts…

1. Open Water Preparation with Coach Tyler Fenwick
2. Not Sure If They Liked It, But It Was Good For Them
3. Big Set with Coach Mathieu Leroy, France
4. Just A Glorious Little Distance Set
5. Working 500 Pace with the Twin River YMCA
6. Can you survive “The Hurricane”
7. Pacing the 1500 Like a Pro
8. Lucky Sevens
9. They Said I Should Instagram This One
10. CAUTION! For Milers Only

Do the Funky Chicken

Posted on by rdwoodruff
Susanna Grundstein
Assistant Coach
Stony Lane Swim Team
This particular drill was designed to encourage critical thinking regarding stroke technique. Word to the wise: it is designed to show swimmers why they don’t want to do certain things. Swimming this way doesn’t work. 
That’s the point.
 This drill, which I call “Funky Chicken,”  encourages children to think about the way they are swimming and what effect each motion has on their speed and efficiency. In this drill, errors are amplified, so even the simple mistake of swimming with open fingers or a closed fist makes a huge impact. 
 The goal: the ability to break apart your stroke and ask, “If the effects of this action were multiplied by 5, would the action be making me five times faster, or five times slower?”
Funky Chicken Teaching Tool
1) ATTEMPT 25 yards or meters of freestyle with thumbs locked in armpits. If you’re in a longcourse pool, at your discretion. THIS WILL BE DIFFICULT TO SWIM, SO BE PREPARED FOR IT. They often look quite comical. 
2) As the swimmers. to name specific pieces of the drill that made swimming that way so ineffective/hard. As they come up with reasons, point out what error equates that particular challenge. I’ve gone further into detail about this discussion below.
3) 25 yards regular freestyle to gauge which skills still need work, then branch into other drills once target areas acquired. I find following up with fingertip drag helpful. 
Discussion: 
At the other end, talk to the kids about why they think this drill was so hard to swim. Have them break it down. I’ve seen people come up with as many as 10 problems. For each problem they come up with, point out which error is equivalent to that problem. Here are a few of the answers people have come up with over the years, and an equivalent mistake. These are only some of the answers. There are more. I’ll do my best to give you the technical version, instead of the 9 year old friendly version, which can get pretty silly sometimes. 
a) Recovery practically requires contortion (recovery not easy) – Contortion swimming and arm-watchers. Shoulders don’t really do that. It hurts. Don’t try to watch your arm as you recover, and don’t stick it straight up in the air behind your shoulder either. It hurts. Finger tip drag a good follow up to this one. (generally only found in first year swimmers)
b) Hard to swim in a straight line– crossing your head during a stroke leads to wiggling. If you throw a ball like this (flop and round and finish throwing pointing at the floor) where does it go? Not where you want it to. Wherever you’re pointing is where the ball will go. Well, guess what? Wherever you’re pointing is where you’re going to go. And if you’re pointing one way on one stroke, and the other way on the next, it’s going to take you forever to get where you’re trying to go. 
c) Wiggling is TIRING– Yes. If you wiggle while you throw a ball, it doesn’t go far. The same thing applies to swimming. If you want to get any actual results from your actions, you’ll need to tighten your core muscles. 
d) Breathing was really difficult. Yes. Basically in order to breathe they have to breach like a whale. Equivalent to over enthusiastic rotary breathers and burrowers. Indirectly related to the fact that breathing forward partially closes your airway, so really, breathing forward barely counts as breathing. 
e) Every time I took a breath I stopped moving, and then had a really hard time getting started again. – Again, yes to both. Equivalent to breathing forward and/or treading breath. Lifting your head up stops forward motion, and it’s a lot easier to keep moving than it is to get started again. An object in motion stays in motion, and an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an opposing force. On top of that, breathing forward allows a much smaller intake than rotary breathing, while still taking longer. 
f) only using half your arm– shortened stroke and/or windmilling. The shorter wingspan equates to, among other things, the decrease in power generated by strokes without full extension or when the back half of the stroke is chopped off. It also illustrates what happens when you don’t actually exert any pressure on the water during a stroke (i.e. windmilling) It’s not the number of strokes you take, it’s how much you get out of each one that matters. Long stroke strokes. Or, as I like to tell my kids, “You aren’t trying to get to the bottom of the pool, are you? Reach for your destination. That’s the wall, not the floor.” 
g) pushing with your elbow- nothing to push with – swimming with your hand in a fist or dropping either the wrist below fingertips  or elbow below wrist during the pull. In any of those situations the force generated is all concentrated on a single small point (the fist, the elbow of the heel of the hand). Instead of meeting with resistance, the single point of pressure pierces through it, so that nothing comes of the action taken. A flat surface is more effective at pushing than a single point, which will puncture.  In small children, the fist is the more likely error. In the middle age groups, the dropped elbow. In older children, the dropped wrist. Trying to swim with any of those is like forcing yourself to swim funky chicken…and why would anyone voluntarily swim funky chicken? 
h) hole in between upper arm and forearm- swimming with open fingers, The water goes right through the holes in between your fingers. You can’t eat soup with a fork. 
i) I kept sinking. –  This is a good one. Mostly it equates to burrowing, but it can be tailored to match the swimmer who says it. Because the kids are getting virtually no aid from their arms in this drill, their feet are doing all of the work. But because of the wiggling, it’s hard to keep kicking; they sink a little, then run into several other problems, particularly problems A & D (contortionists and breach-breathers). 
Basically any time you make one of the errors we just talked about, you’re forcing yourself to swim Funky Chicken. And why would anyone ever voluntarily swim funky chicken?
This drill works especially well for wigglers, contortion swimmers, and frantic windmillers.

Poor Man’s Power Tower Dolphin Kicks

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Ryan Woodruff
Head Coach
Lynchburg YMCA

We do this set in a SC pool, but it could work in a LCM pool as well. Have swimmers partner up, with each partnership getting a stretch cord. One person wears the belt and is in the water.  The other person stands on deck and holds the cord, letting it out gradually to provide resistance.  It is sort of a “poor man’s Power Tower.” The person in the water does:

4 fast underwater dolphin kicks (then gets towed back to the wall) then immediately pushes off into:
6 fast underwater dolphin kicks (same)
8 fast underwater dolphin kicks (same)
10 fast underwater dolphin kicks (same)
12 fast underwater dolphin kicks (unhook the belt) and immediately push off into
1 x 25 all out sprint choice with max underwater kicking (at full speed, not necessarily max distance)
1 x 25 ez and trade places.

Repeat as many times as you wish.