Inspired by some of the discussion in the fly thread , I was wondering how you all feel about drills.
Personally, they drive me nuts, yet everywhere people rave about TI and boy do my coaches like 'em. I find that generally drills just make me feel as though I'm learning to swim a way I will never actually swim, as opposed to helping me focus on one aspect of the stroke. For instance, last night, we were doing breaststroke drills and I spent the entire time trying to learn the drill as opposed to focusing on what we were meant to learn.
Also, I tend to learn technique by figuring out what feels right, but with drills, it feels different because you aren't doing the full stroke.
What about you?
Former Member
Originally posted by Kevin in MD
George,
I am wondering you would or how you do in fact work stroke correction time into a standard masters practice of one hour. At a master swim session I take a lane at a time and spend five or more minutes doing stroke stuff. It may be a dropped elbow, finish, shoulder roll, breathing in the arm pit, head to high, hand position, only one correction to work on at a time. On front crawl I have 29 items that I check and try to correct.
Originally posted by geochuck
The best swim coach I ever knew always said you have to swim to be good.
The only drills we ever did were arms only, kicking front and back with out a board and bilateral breathing. Lots of fartlicks and timed swims. We did fartlicks or pyramids before they had a name.
'scuse me George, with all respect, I just gotta correct the spelling of:
FARTLEK (färtlk)
NOUN:
An athletic training technique, used especially in running, in which periods of intense effort alternate with periods of less strenuous effort in a continuous workout.
ETYMOLOGY:
Swedish, speed play : fart, running, speed (from fara, to go, move, from Old Norse; see per- 2 in Indo-European roots) + lek, play (from leka, to play, from Old Norse leika)
Fartlick,
fartlek, Fartlek comes from the Swedish word for 'Speed Play'
I may be a terrible speller however I was also told, the training system was called after Desmond Fartlick. Who ever he was.
Originally posted by geochuck
Fartlick,
fartlek, Fartlek comes from the Swedish word for 'Speed Play'
I may be a terrible speller however I was also told, the training system was called after Desmond Fartlick. Who ever he was.
ha! could be right! I'm never quite sure of myself...
it's just the word itself is SO open to silly comments.
I myself love doing fartleks in workouts...
Best to change it to pyramid it is not as crude. The other cleaner version is ladder training.
There is also Garelick, a real swimming platform www.boatersworld.com/.../CategoryDisplay
Originally posted by geochuck
I have been watching other coaches who make up their workouts and every work out is a drill no time spent on stroke correction.
Where I'm from these people aren't really coaching. This type of "coach" is just punching a time card, collecting a paycheck. Drills require hands-on coaching. Fundamentals cannot be taught without some type of feedback. But, fundamentals are required to be good at anything, IMO. I seem to remember a post that read, "Build a volkswagon, drive a volkswagon. Build a porsche, drive a porsche." As a coach, I feel that drills are important to build that porsche, even at the masters level. If drills are accompanied by a coach sitting down reading the paper, then you aren't even going to be able to build a gremlin.
Nothing against any of you VW owners or gremlin lovers. Boy, wouldn't that be a thread!
Depends on what you mean by drills. I swim by myself with no coach or team, currently doing Mo Chambers workouts off this site, so I don't have to worry about what others are doing or the coach wants. When the workout calls for drills, I work on whatever I think I need to work on that day.
Recent examples include trying to break my bad habit of breathing on the first stroke after the flip, so I'll swim 100's trying to wait until stroke 2. I'm working on dolphin kicking off the wall, so I'll do 25's and do 5 the first set, 4 the next. I'll combine the dolphin off the wall drill with the don't breathe yet drill. I'll do an underwater 25 dolphin kick with fins without breathing. And I always count strokes. If I'm over 15 for a non-sprinted 25 meter length, I'll do a length where I try and stretch it out and get back to 12 or 13. I'll see how long I can swim at a decent pace holding stroke at 15 or under.
I consider all of these to be drills, and I'm certain all have helped my swimming.
Originally posted by geochuck
Fartlick,
fartlek, Fartlek comes from the Swedish word for 'Speed Play'
I may be a terrible speller however I was also told, the training system was called after Desmond Fartlick. Who ever he was.
My father's first language was Swedish. He always told me that it ment playful journey. Unfortunately, my father is dead. I always thought it ment fun journey. So I looked at my Swedish lanuage dictinary/There is no Fart word there is fard which means journey. when you look up speed it gives the verb fart. Then I asked the retired minister who confimed me. He said that farte means what one might think and would never be said in public and it is an English word made to fit into Swedish by immigrants. Thank you Pastor Contance Johnson (there are many Swedish desendants in Galesburg, IL). Lek I knew means to play but many like as in silly . I looked that word up in my dictionary It means 1. ; (med dockor) play; pa~in play: ur~en out of the . 2 (kort~ ) pack 3 (-fiskars-) spawning ( My comment. This is turned into a slang for sex, I think) pairing and mating.
Lik is a very common Swedish word that means death, or dead body. It is used in slang for some one who is boring. It also means alike.
What Swedish I know is almost all American Swedish slang. When ever my father, his brother, & his sister were talking they spoke Swedish. American Swedish is almost, at least here, all slang. When my fahter got mad could he say some Swedish.
Anyway, I think we can determine that fartlek means somehting like speed play or fast play or maybe fast journey. I don't think it is fartlik -speed death although that's how you might feel when you do it! I thnk in the book written in the 1907's by the runner who died, can't remember his mane Jim Ryan maybe... He says it means speed play.
Tacks meca or tacks gotta haul. those are slang for thank you.
I just did some searching and found Phelps and Coughlin do quite a bit of kicking drills, among others. Not an overwhelming amount of time seemed to be spent on drills, but at least some time, and enough for them to be mentioned in articles.
I would imagine that by the time you're training for the olympics, you've pretty much broken your bad habits (at least the major ones), and are working to improve and focus on certain aspects of a stroke.
That being said, I'm sure people react to drills in different ways. Everyone learns differently, so some people may not get the benefit from drills that others do, but I can't see why it would hurt to try them once in awhile.
just a thought. :)
Originally posted by craiglll@yahoo.com
That's a drill you wre doing it just wasn't something you wanted to label as a drill.
It isn't about wanting to label; it's just having different definitions of drill, but thanks for ascribing delusion when there was a much better possibilty for explanation. I do enjoy my motives being impugned.
My beef is with, shall we say, the subset of drills that involve not swimming the stroke as you normally would (with the exception of kick and pull sets) as opposed to just focusing on a particular ascpect or sensation while swimming the stroke. I'm sorry I wasn't clearer before. Take catch-up for instance. I spend so much time focusing on countering my instinct to start pulling at a certain point that I get nothing else from it. I do the drill because I do what my coach tells me to, but it's certainly beyond frustrating.
I was curious if I was crazy or in the bell curve on that feeling. The poll is inconclusive.
