Friday 26th April 2024
It’s that time of year when sea temperatures are beginning to improve. Would you also like to improve your swimming this year? Have you ever considered having swim coaching or joining a swim coaching group?
Benefits of working with a swim coach
Swim coaching, whether it be 1:1 or in a group can have multiple benefits for your swimming:
It can improve your confidence in the water, particularly with going safely into deeper water
It can be a fresh impetus to try new things and stop the standard pacing up and down
It can help you improve your stroke by learning and practicing specific drills, video analysis and watching other swimmers in the group
It can help you recover from injury and a coach can support you to gently resume safe water based activities
It can help you achieve a goal or work towards a challenge. A couple of swimmers in my swim group are working towards open water swim challenges and triathlons locally.
It can be the all important factor in motivating you to keep swimming and look for continual improvement.
An example pool based swim coach session
A lot of folks are nervous about joining a swimming group and wonder whether they will be good enough so to speak. In practice it is not a competition nor is there any need for comparison with other swimmers, we are all on a personal journey to improve our swimming whilst having some fun and getting fitter at the same time.
I have been running coached group swims at Nairn pool which enable swimmers to practice all four strokes, learn open water skills and drills and yet mainly focus on front crawl improvement. Here is an example of one of our sessions:
Swim theme: Laying down strong foundations - Overall distance 1K
Warm-up (300M):
100m Kick - using kick board 4x25m with 3 or 4 different kick strokes
200m easy swim focus on ‘effortless slow’ technique
100M Back
100M Breast
Drills (100M): 4x25m front crawl technique: Head position
Main set (400M):
200m front crawl with practicing bilateral breathing
200m made up of:
25FC 25Back x 2 =100m
25FC 25Breast x 2 =100m
Drills (100M)
Butterfly: standing hips
Butterfly: mermaid/dolphin arms by side 2x25M
OW: goggles off in deep end/breathe to live 2x25M
Cool down (100M): 100m easy swim - own choice stroke
Any element of this session can be adapted to suit the swimmer, for example the warm up can be shortened to 100M instead of 300M. If you can’t swim back stroke you can change that element to one you can swim.
Joining swim coaching in Nairn
I am an STA qualified and insured Open Water Swim Coach and can provide:
1:1 open water swim coaching in the pool and the sea
Coached Group Swims in the pool - these tend to be in blocks (for example a Spring block of 8 weeks is currently underway) and are designed to suit the Open Water swim season and are focused on practicing stroke improvement, open water skills and fitness in a safe group setting, so you can try transferring this learning from the pool to the open water. These sessions normally happen on a Thursday evening 8-9pm at Nairn Pool and are called ‘Skills, drills and thrills’ sessions. We will be practicing some open water techniques and generally improving our fitness and skills whilst having fun. There are 6 spaces per lane.
Coached Group Swims in the sea
Swim and kayak support on your adventure swim if you are training for a long distance swim or an open water race/ endurance event and want to swim for longer than an hour.
To Sign up or express your interest in swim coaching with me or joining our group please email nairnbeachadventures@gmail.com
Whilst you are waiting to get on board with my swim coaching, here are some other swimming resources you might find useful:
Please consider reading my suggested outdoor swimming kit list and other swimming stories on Medium, where you will also see my Swim Coaching statement.
If you are on Strava do give me a ‘follow’ and I will follow you back so we can support each other’s swim activities.
There are various Nairn based swim groups on WhatsApp which I can connect you in to so you can join the various informal dips and swims that these groups organise. These swims are not coached or insured in any way as they are simply informal arrangements between friends. But rest assured there are generally plenty of folks around who can support your swimming and generally keep an eye out for each other.
Swim on friends :)