A Look into What CVST Has Been Doing at Practice
A Look into What CVST Has Been Doing at Practice
For those of you who have been wondering what your children have been doing at swim practice without water, this is the long awaited return of Randy’s World, my weekly pre-website column.
We are fortunate to have a swim coach on staff with a doctorate in Physical Therapy in Maria Zambito. After leaving CVST’s coaching staff upon earning her undergraduate degree from USF to continue her education, Maria broadened her swimming horizons by working with teams in South Florida, Southern California, and most prestigiously the USA Swimming National Open Water Team. Maria has handpicked the exercises that we use and has either designed or offered her guidance in every workout your child has participated. If you have any questions as to how they pertain to swimming and can make your child a better swimmer, she will be happy to answer them.
During week one, with temperatures in the upper 80’s and low 90’s and CVST optimistically hoping to find a pump that we can install, we started practice with dryland. The first 3 days we began with a raffle, divided the kids into groups with seniors to Bronze level swimmers for team bonding, and rotated stations with different exercise. We offered frequent water breaks but the older swimmers could not last an hour and we released the Bronze group to the Splash pad to play for the last 15 minutes. At the hour we released the older groups to the Splash pad. On Thursday, we started practice with a video of dryland training for swimmers to show the team how hard the swimmers in the video work and that dryland is not easy. Then we went out to the grass field and lined up by practice groups and held each group accountable for their performance. On Friday, we had the Boo Buffett no practice and Saturday the Senior Groups finally got some pool time at Berkeley Prep but got flooded out by rain
Week two, we started off with swim bingo where each letter and number had a corresponding exercise the first group to fill their card got a prize. Day two, we swam at Avila, Day three was the Halloween costume party, Day four was Halloween, Day five back to Avila, and Day six was a special Saturday Practice.
Week three, Day one, we started in the classroom again and introduced the theme “Afraid to be Great?” Started with a Michael Phelps video of 10 rules of success where the kids actually could recite his ten rules. We went on to my “Pink Elephant” story where I explain how the brain does not distinguish between the positive or the negative. In an effort to introduce positive visualization into our dryland routine, we practiced a relaxation exercise from a USA Swimming National Age Group Conference and proceeded to visualize our biggest dream in swimming. After 45 minutes in the classroom we went outside to improve our flexibility, strength and conditioning. Day two, we watched Natalie Coughlins training for success video, a video on medicine ball training for swimmers, did our relaxation and visualization for the upcoming SPA meet, and went outside to introduce ourselves to medicine ball training.
Day 3 will bring another motivational video, a video on Butterfly, another story with the theme “Afraid to be great?”Practice relaxation visualization of the swimmer racing the perfect butterfly.
Coach Randy
