The primary take away that I got from reading this article was not whether the French were inferior or not (Leslie, how can you say that! ;) ), what I take away from this is that the suits make coaching more of a challenging. Not only must you consider the current suits when coaching, but you also must consider the future suits.
Should I teach my 8 year olds to swim with a stroke that works well with the suits that they wear now or should I encourage them to use a stroke that will work better with the tech suits that they will wear in 8 years. I think many coaches, myself included, haven't thought much about changing strokes to fit the current suits, let alone the future suits.
What I took out of it was very similar; that coaching needs to adapt (or does it?) to the "future" of swimming. For me, my philosophy is to have my swimmers out of the tech suits for as long as possible (as long as they are competitive), and move on from there. When they start to enter into the National arena, then we'll look at the tech suits and how to make the minor stroke adjustments at that point (which, hopefully, won't be too many or too significant). Possibly, that is the wrong theory to have, but as the article mentioned, there is no suggestions as to where the swimming world (tech wise) is going...other than faster!
The primary take away that I got from reading this article was not whether the French were inferior or not (Leslie, how can you say that! ;) ), what I take away from this is that the suits make coaching more of a challenging. Not only must you consider the current suits when coaching, but you also must consider the future suits.
Should I teach my 8 year olds to swim with a stroke that works well with the suits that they wear now or should I encourage them to use a stroke that will work better with the tech suits that they will wear in 8 years. I think many coaches, myself included, haven't thought much about changing strokes to fit the current suits, let alone the future suits.
What I took out of it was very similar; that coaching needs to adapt (or does it?) to the "future" of swimming. For me, my philosophy is to have my swimmers out of the tech suits for as long as possible (as long as they are competitive), and move on from there. When they start to enter into the National arena, then we'll look at the tech suits and how to make the minor stroke adjustments at that point (which, hopefully, won't be too many or too significant). Possibly, that is the wrong theory to have, but as the article mentioned, there is no suggestions as to where the swimming world (tech wise) is going...other than faster!
