Hi everyone,

I hope everyone is having a great offseason and has recovered fully from the swim team season. Winter swim is going extremely well and the coaches have been doing a great job improving the swimmers' strokes. I promised everyone offseason workouts and I will follow up with that, but I wanted to start by letting everyone know what we've been doing in winter swim with some accompanying videos so that even those doing no swim at all can learn something in the offseason and improve. However, even if you can't do winter swim (of some sort), the best thing for next summer would be to get any amount of swim practice that you can. If anyone wants to join winter swim late, please reach out and I'll see if we have room.

We've done the following things during winter swim:

• 2 weeks of freestyle basics and breathing;
• 2 weeks of Backstroke, with emphasis on turns and finishes. The kids did really well working on counting their strokes as they come into the wall.
• 1 week of Breaststroke, with the little ones working on getting legal. Arggh, there were still single hand touches. We're working on it.
• Last week: Breathing endurance or taking fewer breaths while swimming. This is a big deal - frequently, breathing fewer times while racing is the best way to get faster. Part of it is mental (being willing to be uncomfortable) and part is building up the endurance. Olympic swimmers in the 25 meter freestyle don't take a breath; some don't breath during the 50m but take a maximum of 3 breaths.

Here are some relevant videos (we'll just start with Freestyle and endurance):

Freestyle!

General freestyle video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E9O2Iz4WwE&t=19s

This one is longer, but has a ton of good drills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJKhOLpv0Oo

Avoiding over-rotating in swim (big deal, lots of kids over rotate when breathing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMpHulcTiQQ&list=P...

Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx8ptCMOcXc&list=P...

Timing when breathing (if your breathing is too late, you get imbalanced and your legs scissor, throwing off your stroke): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c28SMt8CraI&t=136s

Endurance!

Building breathing endurance (please note the part about doing these with supervision only and not pushing too far): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0W8Id9V4DI

That seems good to start. I'll be following up with other videos and the workouts I promised you. Cross training is great - get out there and get active. See you soon!