Calling all swim coaches! Improve your coaching of starts, turns and finishes.
Each week we receive many requests from swim coaches who would like to know what sort of content is provided in the Swim Coach Advantage program.
Members are provided with:
- access to live weekly Mentor PODs where coaches come together and discuss key coaching items,
- a weekly written or video Swim Obs – an observation made in the previous week by the coaching team,
- access to more than 180 videos containing drills and skills across the four competitive strokes,
- access to a private Facebook Group where they can ask questions and share ideas… and much more.
The content is prepared by former Olympic Head Coach Leigh Nugent, leading aquatics educator and manager Gary Barclay and dual Olympic Coach Rohan Taylor.
Today we are going to share with you a video prepared by Olympic Gold medal coach Rohan Taylor. This video has been released to members today and is titled “Improving starts, turns and finishes”.
In the video, Rohan looks closely at strategies for coaches to assist swimmers to improve their starts, turns and finishes. Each of these skills must be taught correctly so that young swimmers develop the correct technique from a young age. Whilst these skills can be further enhanced, teaching the correct foundation skills to young swimmers will help them tremendously and save you time later on. If you are a coach and enjoy this, you will love Swim Coach Advantage.
To find out more, go to Swim Coach Advantage and read through the page and watch the video below the top fold.
Rohan
If you want 10 kicks for 5sec
20 kicks for 10 sec etc
Are you copying this frequency horizontally depending on their time for 10m juniors and 15m seniors
Eg. 8sec to 15m = 16 kicks ?
Hi Michelle – for me I am aiming at 2 things when giving the athletes the number of kicks for a time when doing vertical kicking:
1. Getting them to increase frequency of kick so they can transfer to the horizontal underwater – short time frames to this
2. Getting them fit so they can do the kicks off the last turn in a 200+ event – longer time frames but with the same emphasis – building endurance.
When moving to the horizontal and practicing 10 meters underwater off the dive or walls, I focus on the frequency being maintained and adjust the number of kicks against the time to the distance:
Example is if it takes 4 seconds to get to 10 meters then I would ask them to aim for 8 kicks to get there. Very general rule but I think your email referenced something to this affect.
Focus on increasing frequency of underwater kick so they can go faster.
I hope this helps
Cheers Rohan
Hi Rohan
This is really insightful. Do you have junior swimmers doing vertical kick with or without fins?
Thanks for the support
Hi Richard – with juniors I always did vertical kick without fins. This would make it a challenge but also provided me the opportunity to work with them on their body position as they were doing the VK. The aim would be to keep their head and shoulders stable while focusing on a 2 way kick that was narrow holding their belly button in.
Start with 5 kicks then progress out as long as they hold the position.
From there i would mix in some streamlining off the wall asking them to do the same number of kicks and see how far they go.
Hope this helps
Cheers Rohan