Visiting Ashton Swimming Club
Ashton Swimming Club is a small club in Manchester, but one that some of my teammates at COMAST originally came from. Chris, who coaches the COMAST Raven Moss squad, has a son who trains with Ashton too and he was kind enough to facilitate this visit for me. He also did a lot of fly-on-the-wall style filming, which is uploaded on my YouTube channel now, and can be viewed here.
Initially Chris introduced me to all the coaching and teaching staff at the club, while some learn to swim lessons were taking place. On this Tuesday evening, we had the learn to swim session, then two separate hour-long sessions for the more advanced swimmers.
The first of these sessions I led some freestyle stroke development, focusing on keeping the head in line while breathing. There was a wide range in ages and abilities across the six lanes, with some of the very young swimmers being invited to the session despite normally only training widths. This was initially a challenge for me, but I was able to adapt the drills and volume for them so that the whole squad was able to have my attention and benefit from the session.
The second session was split into two, the first half I was with a couple of lanes doing freestyle again. Our focus here was on getting an aggressive rotation to enable a more direct and powerful freestyle. This is vital in sprint swimming because it means we can get the stroke rate higher, without thinking about pulling the arms faster and harder- which inevitably results in a loss of connection and rhythm. The swimmers did a great job here and were able to reduce their stroke counts and increase the speed of some 25s. The ideal scenario!
The next half was with a different group looking at underwater fly kick, and fly swim. As has become my favourite way to teach underwater rhythm and flow we started on a vertical kick progression. This is so useful because it gives instant feedback to the athletes about how they’re kicking: if they kick too small and all knee-bend they end up sinking. Similarly, if they kick too big and slow, they will also sink. We can then transfer this feel into normal underwaters.
Our fly focus was on keeping the stroke direct and driving forwards, especially when breathing. Again, the swimmers were very receptive to this and were able to implement these drills into their free swimming.
Overall, this was a great club visit. The coaching staff were very friendly and accommodating and the athletes were hard working and conscientious.
Great work Ashton!
As I mentioned earlier, a video from this evening is on my YouTube channel @JIngramSwimming now!
