Merry Swim Season

It was pretty fun to see most of you at the mall tonight for registration. It always makes me excited for the new season when I see that most of you are much bigger than last season and are excited to get back in the water and start training again. Based on the numbers we have so far, the way we have set up the groups and schedule should be perfect.

We have a very tactical plan for this season in all groups; which is to say that we know what we want to achieve and know how we intend to achieve it. The addition of Ian Cunningham to the Silver and Bronze groups is a great strength for many reasons... first and foremost that we have more expertise working in the younger groups. Ian has worked in Etobicoke and has developed many of their top level swimmers from a young age. I am really excited to see the progress kids in his group make.

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It is Wednesday and I promised to post some video every Wednesday. A couple of weeks ago, I posted video of Kyle with the velocity results over time. Below is a video of Russian sprint Freestyler Nikita Konovalov. The interesting thing about this video is that with a static underwater and above water camera you can actually see his speed and how fast he is moving. Above and beyond that, they overlay his speed both in graph form and a real time speedometer on the right hand side. Nikita averages approx 1.5m/s - 1.7m/s when he settles on surface speed but pay attention to his dolphin kick off of the walls: he peaks well over 2.0m/s off of the walls with his powerful dolphin kick. (If you remember, Kyle Haas was 2.08m/s off his dive, then dropped to between 1.6m/s and 1.4m/s excluding his wall which was 1.8m/s).



Todays lesson: They limit how much dolphin kick you are allowed to do off the walls (15m) for a reason: Its bloody fast!! Learn to kick faster and MAXIMIZE it, especially off of the walls.

Need more proof? Check out Ryan Lochte doing 50BK in 25.0 seconds. The fastest athletes are learning how to swim fast where most of you least suspect it. This is where we need to get better!




See you soon.

Mike Thompson
Head Coach
HHBF