Setting up for the training (Nolan Cleary, Post 1)

Cleary, Nolan

Period 4

Getting everything setup and ready

Ever since I was in the third grade my life in one way or another has almost always revolved around swimming. Be it on my club team Chinook Aquatics, my summer league team Fair wood barracudas, or most recently (and currently) the boys' swim team for Kentridge. Now so far I've been pretty successful in my swimming career however up until now my stroke and training has either been what I'm expected to do in practice or just using brute force to power through all the practices.

So that's why with the help of the book Complete Conditioning For Swimming by: Dave Salo I aim to change how I currently swim as well as how I train for swimming by giving more thought into what I'm doing. Before I had started reading this book I had quite wrongly assumed that it would just start off with different sets and activities to practice to improve my swimming. As I soon found out Salo said in the book, "before you embark on this journey, you need a map- some idea of where you are, where you're going, and how you will get there" (Salo 1). What he means by this is that before you start improving your swimming you first need to set up a basis of where you currently are so you have something to compare with later on.

The way to find this base status is through a multitude of mini tests. They aren't anything rigorous or impossible just base line tests that anyone is able to do. The first one is to measure swimming efficiency, swimming fast while using little energy, and efficacy, the power used to produce your stroke. Finding these values is easy with a couple equations as well as keeping a swim diary for events to record splits and stroke speed (Salo 3). Also their are other tests that were there to test the strength of body parts that directly correlated to your stroke; abs, shoulders, rotatory cuff, leg strength for jumping, as well as a few in water performances.

Luckily after reading this I had to swim at a club swim meet and was able to create my first try at a swim diary and with the use of the included equations it actually helped me see where I am actually starting. 

Now that I had a base line for one of my event I started to do bases for my other events as a swam and keep swimming more events. Now that I had started this diary to actually track my results it's time to start putting in the work into changing how a practice and get ready for swimming events. This book so far has helped me do the thing I haven't done or really thought of doing which was finding out the specifics of all my event before I begin changing things. The only question I have at this time is that whether it would be better to in the future to supply pictures of the workout and things I'm doing to improve my swimming or would it be better to see what all I;m doing in water?

Citation: Salo, Dave, and Scott A. Riewald. Complete Conditioning for Swimming. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2008. Print.