Training Example, Proper Stroke Count Training Within a Set

This video is an example of proper training.  Karen is working on her Fly, check it out!

The Set:

1x100 (1:30) {50 Backstroke Kick + 50 Fly Drill}

1x50 (1:00) {50 Fly Swim}

The Drill must be done exactly the same way for each 25: 3 right arm strokes, 3 left arm strokes, 2 full strokes.  

The Swim 50 should also be done with a predicted stroke count (the athlete has an idea going in what the count is going to be), and that stroke count should get consistent toward the last half of the set.  In this video, you'll see Karen do a 28.0, going 7 strokes down and 7 strokes back (so that's 14 strokes in 28 seconds -- right on the proper stroke count, which is half of the 50 time).  Karen also knows that she is going to kick 7 kicks off each wall to make this happen.

Karen settled into a 1:12-1:10 Kick-Drill 100, followed by a 29.0-27.7 50 Fly, with stroke counts that were the exact same as you see on the video for the last 15 minutes of the set.   This is consistent training.

We are pretty good, as a team, at hitting the ideal stroke counts on "stand-alone" 25s and 50s.  The next step for us is to develop these abilities outside of single swims, and put them into a training set.  This type of training set is a good example of the type of set we will attack….it was relatively short, the rest intervals allowed for good, aggressive kicking off the walls, and the distances I asked for were a single 50 at a time (everyone's 100 was made of 2 separate 50s).

Here's the video.  You can see lots of people doing well on this set, although the video is focused on Karen.