Coaches Education

Cutting Time: Tips For Improving Turns, Underwaters and Breakouts One of the most effective ways to drop time quickly is to improve your turns, underwaters and breakouts. Sloppy transitions can easily add time to a race. When you’re performing them well off every wall, those seconds add up quickly. ...

Goldminds: How to Become a Better Swimmer By Doing Nothing* ******************************************** There’s an old saying about success: “The harder I work, the more successful I get.” Seems logical: I want to succeed, I want to improve. I want to swim faster…so...I work harder, I train more of...

What Happens To Your Body During Taper? By J.P. Mortenson Taper is the time leading up to a big competition where swimmers decrease their training volume while increasing their rest in order to prepare their bodies to go best times. So what exactly happens to your body during taper that allows it to...

5 Strength Training Exercises to Improve Swimming Performance By Kayla Riemensperger Weight training is often a highly debated topic in the world of swimming. While there is no clear-cut right or wrong answer to whether or not weights are beneficial for developing swimmers, many year-round programs ...

Special Sets: A Look At the Training Of Andrew Vanas At Nation's Capital One of the delights in the coaching business is watching a swimmer come of age. Dory Halbe, a former American University swimmer and NCAA qualifier, is now an assistant coach at Nation’s Capital Swim Club’s Georgetown Prep site...

5 Signs a Swimmer Has Taken Ownership of Their Sport (Archive) By Brad Jones One common trait that you will consistently see in successful senior level swimmers is that they have complete ownership of their swimming. Over my years of working with high school kids on the Bellingham Bay Swim Team, I’v...

A Q&A With Former Breaststroke Star and Now Standout Coach Michael Norment Pursuing excellence can be a lonely task. For young lad, future CSCAA All-American, professional swimmer and world champion coach, Michael Norment, that meant leaving home at age 12. He, Olympian/world champion Nic Fink and t...

How They Train Nic Fink: A Look At the Work Of the American Breaststroke Star A graduate of The Pingry School and the University of Georgia (2015), 6-3 Nic Fink has spent the last seven years traversing a less traveled road. A 15-time CSCAA All-American and twice an NCAA runnerup in the 100 breastst...

Three Great Coaching Minds - Bob Bowman, Michael Bohl, Vince Raleigh - Discuss Training With Brett Hawke What goes into writing a workout? How is training devised for individual athletes? These are questions that are routinely asked in the sport and can spark quality conversation. Well, an amped-up ...

Swim Training: This Demanding IM Set Will Provide a Test Sometimes, there's nothing better than a stout, long IM set on a Saturday morning. This training set offers one large set split into four "mini sets" that can really challenge tough IMers. It combines elements from 400 IMs and 200 IMs to hard ...

3 Ways You Can Improve Your Swimming Kick By Wayne Goldsmith Wouldn't it be great if kick sets could be interesting, challenging, exciting and something every swimmer looked forward to doing at every workout? Well, they are and here are 3 Ways You Can Improve Your Swimming Kick 1. Stop Doing Slow Ki...

It's Cool To Cooldown: The Importance of Caring For the Body “Do a cooldown.” Whether it be after a race or practice, every swimmer has heard these words from their coach. Cooling down is a lower intensity level of activity and it should be done after strength training, practice, and competition. Co...

Welcome to Swimming World’s Set of the Week. This week’s set is a kick set that has longer kick/swim active recovery that alternates with sets of shorter kicks that work on descending and holding kick intensity: 400 as 150 kick/50 sw smooth 6 x 100 kick, desc 1-3, 4-6 300 as 100 kick/50 sw smooth 6 ...

Dryland Training: Building Early-Season Strength For Later Benefits It’s October, and early-season training finds swimmers working on strengthen and endurance. Whether you’re a swimmer in high school, college or Masters, the need for strength now is essential to be able to achieve faster racing time...

A variety of factors and traits determine if an individual is a superb coach, somewhere in the middle or not very good at the profession. In this article, Wayne Goldsmith - who will be honored by the International Swimming Hall of Fame this weekend - examines some of the characteristics that define ...

The Importance of Test Sets: How They Play a Role In Development By Reagan Reetz, Swimming World College Intern Test set day is the only day in a swimmer’s week that can garner as many reactions as it does. The team spends the day anticipating and discussing it, wondering if they will improve from t...

Q&A With Ian Murray, Highly Successful Coach At Dynamo Swim Club Life is good when one of your former swimmers (National Team member Brooks Curry) wins an Olympic gold medal one year and takes the NCAA 50 and 100 yard freestyle titles the next. Another of Ian Murray’s swimmers currently holds three ...

ASCA Lessons From Legends: Mike Parratto on Aerobic Training Riptide Swim Team's Mike Parratto is one of the world's premier coaches, a man who has guided the careers of world-record holders Jenny Thompson and Regan Smith. Before molding Smith into an Olympic medalist, Parratto was a mentor to Hall ...

Swimming World Training Set: Main Stroke Work Welcome to Swimming World’s latest training set to incorporate into your sessions at the pool. This set is a 3500-yard stroke set that mixes in a little bit of everything. The first half of each round mixes in more aerobic and build work before turning t...

Bob Bowman On Butterfly Development and Age-Group Progression in ASCA Lessons From Legends Through its YouTube page, the American Swimming Coaches Association has made it a goal to provide its members and coaches around the country with opportunities to grow. In a video posted to the ASCA page, futu...