Week 2

This week was a good week for getting back into the pool because there were no long events that took up all our practice time and so I was able to get in a lot of swimming this week.

In the beginning of the week, we focused on a lot of drills and kicking to get our muscles working out and back into shape, until eventually, by the end of the week, we had moved on to more aerobic workouts and longer yardages.

Everybody has a different body type, and so different workouts affect people differently. That’s why I think that it’s great that the club swim team does not make everyone on the team do the exact same drill. So that is why when I do drills for freestyle, I do the catch up drill (sometimes spelled ketchup drill) or the six kick switch drill.

I like the catch up drill because it gets me to focus on my hand placement while swimming. When you do the catch up drill, you keep one hand in the streamline position (figure farthest right in the image) while the other does a stroke. When the hand doing the stroke finishes, it touches the other hand in streamline position, and when that happens, the hand originally in the streamline position now does the stroke while the hand that originally did the stroke, is now in streamline position. Then you repeat the process. In this drill, it is essentially freestyle swimming, just slowed down so that you can focus on hand placement, and the reason it is called catch up drill is because your hand in streamline position is waiting for the other hand doing the stroke to “catch up” to it. A video demonstration can be found here.

Now, the reason I like the 6 kick switch drill is because it gets me to actually kick when doing freestyle. When I swim freestyle, I am one of those swimmers that has trouble doing flutter kick while doing strokes with my arms. I could never coordinate it that well. And since I haven’t been practicing in a while, it has become very difficult for me to coordinate my kicking and strokes again.

So the way six kick switch drill works is that you do kicks on one side, with your head resting on the shoulder of your arm on that side of your body, which is in streamline position. After you have done six kicks on one side, you switch sides and you keep repeating. A demonstration can be found in this link