Sivill Swim Skills: 2 Days of Intensive Swimming Skills Clinics
The end of a busy week for me was the delivery of two swimming clinics in Bolton with Sivill Swim Skills on back-to-back days. Coach Kelly runs these clinics during the school holidays to get some high-quality technique work as well as some athleticism and intensity in land training. The structure of each day was a 2-hour swim session in the morning, a break for lunch, then an hour of land training, an hour to for me to talk to the swimmers and opportunity for them to ask questions, and then another 2 hour pool session. For the swimmers, aged between 8 and 14, this was a long day- especially for those that attended both days. It was also a long day for me, not being used to this kind of all day camp, but with Kelly we were able to make it run smoothly and make it both enjoyable and beneficial for the swimmers.
In the first pool session of day 1 we focused on fly kicks, where we practised a lot of my favourite streamline and vertical kicking drills and took that into some fly turns work. A common mistake on fly turns is to pull the whole upper body out of the water, whereas we actually want to keep ourselves as low in the water as possible. We could then add in the underwater kicks from earlier as a continuation of the fly turn.
We then spent the first part of the second session working on butterfly swim technique. I’m a big proponent of kick being the most important thing in swimming fly, so it works well to transfer the underwater cues and techniques from the morning into the fly swim. We then went into backstroke working on body position and rotation. I am much more proficient at fly and freestyle in my own swimming than backstroke and breastroke, however I believe that all strokes have very similar principles in coaching the techniques, in that we always want to be streamlined, swim direct and forwards (not up and down), kick driving the stroke, and to eliminate dead spots (where we decelerate significantly). Using these principles as my guides I was able to improve the backstroke technique and stroke efficiency of all the swimmers, which we tested through 25s decreasing both the time taken (swimming faster) and the stroke count (better technique) for an overall much more efficient swim. We finished on backstroke turn work, keeping the rotation tight, being in streamline before pushing off the wall, and then incorporating the fly kicks again.
The intent of day 2 was breastroke and freestyle. So, the morning was spent doing breastroke drills to reinforce the need for a great streamline glide position at the end of each stroke, and to make the kicks narrower, and therefore more direct and snappier. We transferred this into underwater pullouts, which rely heavily on those two ideas and finally put together the whole breastroke turn.
Session 2 of day 2 was spent learning all things freestyle. Again, all the drills and cues were based around maintaining a high line in the water and building efficiency through the pull- particularly when breathing. In the same way as the backstroke, we tested this through reducing both stroke count and time on 25s. Once again, we finished the day on turns, ensuring that even though we were tired we could still make ourselves into a tight ball for fast rotation, and hit the streamline before pushing off the wall.
One aspect of these clinics I really liked was that I was able to get into the water too, to demonstrate the drills. Often it can be hard to articulate what I want a drill to look like in a way that makes sense to every swimmer, whereas when they can see, it often has a better impact. I also had an assistant, Ethan, who performed demonstrations after me, so that I could comment on how he performed the drills to again reinforce to the swimmers what we were doing and why.
I also really enjoyed the land training aspect of these clinics. Having not had too much experience in younger athletes’ land training I was a bit unsure of how to run them. However, I quickly realised that the best way would be to do some games to work on reaction times, agility, and speed without these being delivered via boring exercises. I also ran circuits on both days. These contained some upper body, lower body and core strengthening exercises, and some agility and co-ordination drills using cones, ladders and skipping ropes that Kelly had provided.
All in all, these were a very rewarding two days with Sivill Swim Skills. I felt I was able to help all the swimmers, plus Ethan (who swims with Wigan Best) and Coach Kelly (who also coaches at Howe Bridge Swimming Club). It also reinforced to me that I can deliver stroke and land work that I’m not necessarily known for, in such a way that is still incredibly beneficial to other athletes, and that I can take away and use for my own swimming.
