Winhawks Fly at Section Prelims

Welcome back to "Why we Train Wednesday's!" Today we are going to be discussing dryland workouts and why we value them for swimming and all-around physical development. As a Coach for the Winona Swim Club, I love adding dryland regimens into our practices. I do this because it allows the swimmers to develop core strength, coordination, and other small muscle strength needed to help stabilize a swimmer in the water. Learning how to control your body and your movements on land can help you immeasurably in the water. There are many different exercises to perform on land and here are a few of my favorites! #1. Core Work. This one should have been obvious! The main reason a person will want to do core work is to strengthen their midsection. This strengthening allows for better control of your chest, back, shoulders, and arms, and core work allows for great connection to your legs and kicks. There are many different core exercises and we employ as many as possible, much to the dismay of our swimmers! We focus on single and compound movements. Single movements would be crunches, leg lifts, side crunches, side leg lifts, etc... where the swimmer completes one lift or movement. Compound movements, or multiple step activities, would be full situps into streamline, flutter kicks with streamlines(pictured above) tuck ups, v-ups, tuck up into superman, russian twists with tuck ups, and situps with twists. #2. Shoulder exercises. Swimmers are more susceptible to having shoulder issues therefore we do activities that help to strengthen shoulders and stabilizing muscles. We use latex bands attached to an object to help with interior and exterior rotation of the shoulder. We do crabwalks on the ground which make the swimmer focus on moving their entire body while using their arms and shoulders to move them around. We also encourage multiple versions of pushups to help with developing strong chest, back, and shoulder muscles. #3. Bodyweight activities before practice and during. While completing some of our swim sets, we will have the swimmer hop out of the pool and complete bodyweight exercises. We do this because it helps the swimmer focus on something other than swimming and also helps them develop parts of their fitness they may be lacking. We do these leg bodyweight exercises to help develop strong legs for balance on land and in water, and for an even better kick! Some examples would be squats, jumping jacks, high knees, and butt kicks(hamstring work). #4. Weighted exercises. Depending on the season, we have access to the weightroom at the high school and we utilize it to the best of our abilities. We employ weightroom activities to help strengthen our swimmers for any and every sport they may do. There are hundreds of lifts and exercises to do in a weightroom and we do as many as possible to help the swimmers become the best they can be! #5. Stretching. Knowing what and how to stretch can make a very large difference for a swimmer in their career. Not only will stretching help alleviate sore and tight muscles, it is also used to re-focus and calm individuals. We use many different types of stretches to help our swimmers gain flexibility and help those sore muscles loosen up. In big meet, high pressure situations, we have our swimmers stretch to relax. This helps them loosen up, relieve any tension, and allows them to calmly focus on their swims for that day. This concludes today's focus of Dryland training! Thanks for reading and look for more information about why we train next week!