by Admin Mediterra | Sep 24, 2020 | Practice Design
There is some benefit to making parts of your practice quite routine. We want to suggest that you do this with your Warm Up and Cool Down time in each practice. This would lower the amount of new things you need to track in each new practice, and it would allow you to more easily compare and evaluate your body signals at the start and at the finish of practice, from day-to-day.
You will notice that we rarely give a specific assignment for your Warm Up or Cool Down. Since each person will have different needs, we would like you to design this for yourself, following our guidelines.
Warm Up
First, please DO NOT SKIP your warm up time. It is so important to gently bring your performance systems online and coordinated before you increase the intensity of work you require of these systems.
It is recommended that you provide about 8 to 12 minutes of warm up time.
Start moving as gently as you can, letting your body indicate when it is eager to increase intensity. It takes some minutes for the tissues to loosen, the bio-chemistry, the motor, and the cardio-vascular systems to prepare for your main work. The better your tune-up, the more you can accomplish in your main sets.
You may do what we call a Silent Swim for the first 300 to 600 yards or meters. If you are comfortable to do so, we recommend that you swim continuously, but as gently as possible at first so that it is not difficult for the body.
A Silent Swim is where you swim in such a way to make the least amount of noise, splash, waves, or turbulence in the water around you. It gives an assignment to every part of your body to work together toward this single, sensory objective.
Then you may add next 200 with a variety of stroke styles (like breaststroke and backstroke) to work your joints in different movement patterns.
And you may do a short interval set where you change the tempo of your stroke.
An Example Warm Up
Silent Swim for 200
4x 50 of alternate stroke styles (no freestyle)
4 rounds of:
- 3x 25
- 10 seconds passive rest between each 25
- Repeat #1 at gentle stroke tempo
- Repeat #2 at moderate tempo
- Repeat #3 at brisk tempo
Cool Down
This is when you will review some focal point that you worked on today. Choose one focal point from today’s assignments and use that during this final swim.
Swim 200 to 300 (continuous or in pieces) in what I call ‘Pure Pleasure’ swimming mode. With a calm effort level, choose a tempo that is very comfortable, tune in to your focal point and swim with the goal of using that focal point to make the swim as pleasurable as you know how to.
You are certainly welcome to add other activities to your Warm Up and Cool Down time, if those are enjoyable and productive.
If you feel an unpleasant urge to add more to these we would challenge you to search for the justification of those activities – note whether they clearly contribute to the skills and enjoyment you are trying to build. If those activities don’t contribute clearly to your main goals, consider using your precious time in the pool for other activities that will.
by Admin Mediterra | Sep 24, 2020 | Practice Design
It is typical in conventional swimming to have totally different practices every day to prevent boredom. But making new decisions every day takes more energy, and having different practice patterns every day makes it difficult to carefully measure small improvements in quantities and qualities from practice to practice. We recommend that you keep a fairly consistent practice structure, and keep some parts of the practice (like Warm Up and Cool Down) routine. We also encourage you to repeat some of the exact same practice sets over a series of practices so that your body has time to adapt to the challenge and you can more easily notice (and be encouraged by) those small improvements. These practices present very specific puzzles for you to solve that are just within reach of your abilities… if you concentrate. And by concentrating on the puzzle, time disappears and practices become intriguing.
Typical Practice Structure
Our kind of practices may follow this pattern:
- Warm-Up (what we like to call “Tune-Up” in TI), 8 to 12 minutes long
- Main Set 1 (choose a skill assignment), 5 to 15 minutes long
- Main Set 2 (optional). 5 to 15 minutes long
- Main Set 3 (optional), 5 to 15 minutes long
- Cool-Down, 5 to 8 minutes long
To keep things simple and focused on what is necessary, we recommend a simple, routine for the Tune-Up and the Cool-Down. You may change this if you like.
Depending on your time and energy available, you may choose 1, 2, or 3 or more Main Sets for your practice.
For each Main Set you will be assigned one skill project or you may choose one if not given. If you are designing your own practice, we recommend that you change your skill focus every 15 minutes. Having more than one skill project for practice is good.
A Level 1 practice can be anywhere between 30 and 60 minutes from start to finish. It is better to have a short practice with high quality and practice more frequently in the week, than to do long practices, with less quality, less frequently.
by Admin Mediterra | Jun 4, 2020 | Preparation
There is an overwhelming amount of information and opinions out there on stretching before and after running. In general, we think most bodies are going to appreciate doing some sort of warm up. But what should you do for your body?
In some of our live training sessions we may explore dynamic and static stretching exercises. And you may have some that you use already. You may also review some trusted sources on the internet. You may contact a trainer at your fitness club to get personalized instruction on how to develop a routine that fits your needs.
First, be very conservative about starting new stretches, and in how far and how much you do. Though helpful in the long-term, immediately your body may react protectively by tightening up even more. Stretching needs to be done with some understanding of technique and feedback from the body.
Should One Stretch Before Practice?
I would recommend using dynamic stretches that help the body parts move through their full active range of motion, with activities that simulate parts of the running motion.
Some joints need to become more stiff and stable for running – knees, lower back and neck. Some joints need to become more soft and mobile for running – ankles, hips, shoulders.
If there are parts of your body that are short and tight, then it may be better to follow a stretching routine for those at times apart from your running workouts, so that once they are stressed by the stretching, they have time to repair and recover before you make them work in running. If they are stretched beyond current limits and strained just before going running, it is possible for them to tighten up even more out of an automatic protective response, which could actually end up causing more strain or injury.
Dynamic stretching in patterns that simulate running mechanics will move your tissues through their current active range of motion and the body will respond by filling with blood and loosening up to the range you are current capable of.
Should One Stretch After Practice?
This is a very common question, but not easy to answer for each person’s individual needs and response to workout stresses. Remember that tightening of muscles is a protective response – sometimes that should be left alone and sometimes that should be coaxed into loosening up. After the activity, loosening up is generally a good idea.
The first needs after a work out are:
- To let tissues loosen up, vascular system to open up,
- To encourage the body to flush waste products from the system,
- To reduce inflammation, and
- To remove stress on joints and tissues.
Some stressed muscles, and tissues may react negatively to stretching after a workout, while stretching might help others open up the flow of waste move out.
Beneficial after-workout activities may include:
- walking
- gentle swimming
- walking in deep water (works better than compression clothing)
- alternating cold and hot water immersion
- gentle rolling on a foam roller
- some yoga moves
by Admin Mediterra | Jun 4, 2020 | Preparation
Every body is different in its needs, to some degree. Yet, every body, especially as those bodies get older, will appreciate having a good warm up. As a matter of fact, the better the warm up, the better your body will be able to do the hard work of the main training ahead.
Likewise, cool down is important because it allows the body a way to gradually shift out of the exercise mode, allowing tissues, fluids, and temperature to adjust smoothly. Abrupt shifts from exercise to sedentary activities can be surprisingly hard on the body.
We recommend that you keep the same routine for your warm up from practice to practice. This will make it possible for you to sense the starting condition of your body from day to day. If some factor from the day or hours before could affect your performance, you will likely be able to notice signs of this in your body during warm up and compare to the way you have felt on other days, doing the exact same warm up activities.
By keeping your warm up and cool down routine the same, this will reduce the amount of planning and thinking you need to do for each practice.
Design Guidelines
Make your warm up 10 to 15 minutes long. Never skip your warm up.
Make your cool down 5 to 10 minutes long. You might skip your cool down if necessary but you might pay a price in a longer recovery.
Warm Up Routine
5 to 15 minutes of preparatory exercises.
Then 3 to 5 minutes of brisk walking.
Then 5 to 8 minutes of gentle jogging.
Allow heart rate to increase gradually, with gradually more vigorous activity.
Provoke an increase core temperature, particularly on cool days, so that you feel warm all over your body by the time you begin your main practice activity.
Cool Down Routine
5 minutes of gentle jogging.
5 minutes of walking, transition from brisk to gentle.
