Tuesday 22 April 2014

Blog 1942:Glasgow British Championships 2014

Recently I attended the British Championships at Glasgow, partly in my role as DX assistant head coach and partly off my own back to learn. It was a really great experience and some of the swimming was fantastic. I got to work with international class swimmers and mix it up in the warm up/down pool with some of the countries top coaches.

In a way you learn more by doing this than any course or text book can tell you. I learnt a lot about how good our programme is and how good and knowledgeable our coaches actually are. A lot of our pre and post pool routines are far beyond what the swimmers were doing there along with our methods of training. Whilst this all looks good for us we are still along way off in other areas that need to be addressed and improved. Key to that is knowledge of the swimmers, this was phenomenal in terms of targets, pacing, race plans and how to execute them, most of our swimmers are yet to fill in a simple goal setting sheet let alone know the details of how exactly they are going to swim to hit their goals. Nutritionally whilst we put alot of focus on this the major teams had a nutritionist working with them checking hydration and energy levels and making sure swimmers were eating right and natural foods, in fact Team Scotland had a full array of support staff including S and C coaching, physiotherapists, psychologists and team managers to help record every detail of a swimmers day to day experience within a major meet.With 2 massage tables and testing stations and computer generated data back up it was whole new level of coaching.

It was pleasing to see Long Eaton based swimmers competing and competing well at this meet. Kevin Wallbank, Hannah Jones and Francesca Muir Harris. Kevin and Francesca both came through our learn to swim programme and went through the club all the way to DX, once again proving as a club we have the best pathway around.

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