Let take a close look at the cooldown. Obviously it comes at the end of the workout. Too often it is an after thought consisting of some mindless activities to get rid of lactate or some such nonsense. Instead it should be considered an integral part of the training session. Don't think of it as the end of the current session, think of how you can use the time to set up the next training session. As an alternative to cooldown I have started using the term reset to better describe what I hope to achieve. A well thought out and structured cooldown will reset the system so that the next session can start at an optimum level. I structure the reset to be more active than passive. For example I would prefer hurdle walkovers instead of jogging, an orchestrated series of yoga poses rather than static stretching or left handed throws for a right-handed thrower. Look closely at activities that will help reset the nervous system, are a logical extension of the current workout and that will setup the subsequent workout.
3 Comments
Allen Adamson
I like the idea of opposite arm throwing, therefore should we run backwards in a reset/cool down???
Coach Nico
In my opinion this is a topic every coach should try to question what their are doing. There seems to be a long standing tradition that workout starts with a warm-up and finished with a warm down. To be fair, this makes sense and everyone can understand the need to proceed in this manner (injury prevention, recovery, etc.).
And be assured that I’m not questioning this traditional wisdom – however I do encourage you to think about the following an extremely succesful and respected fellow swim coach ask me to think about a while back when I visited him in China.
While looking at my training logs, he did raise the question why I would do a warm-up (again) in the pool after having spent 1h doing dryland with my team. Didn’t I think they were warmed up at this point and ready to go? Did this take away from our limited time in the pool to get the work done I had planned that day? Was that swim down really necessary with a set that already had an active recovery component in it just so we could say that we followed protocol?
The answer to this is most likely twofold. And don’t get me wrong – I didn’t just go home and never warm-up or swim down again. I did however start to experiment with looking at multiple of our workouts as a succession – so dryland did become our warm-up and we would cut right to the meat when hitting the pool. And we may even have used te following morning swim to recover/reset using 3 sessions to accomplish one of our training goals and maximizing the limited time we have available.
This won’t work for all athletes on your team as they may miss one of those three sessions. And I did have mixed feelings/results and feedbacks. I can also still get much better at implementing this type of workouts into my training cycles. What I like most about it though is that it does challenge me to look at the things we do and ask myself if it’s really going to help us get better or if it’s just filler work.
Swami Matt
Nico– I definitely try mixing things up just for the sake of experiment… how do our SWAMis react to x if we try y? Sometimes we fall really flat of what I was hoping for and so, I may try something I know that works the next time around, but other times I may just try it again (or tweak it) just because it might have been “one of those sorta days.” I recall Coach Bowerman from U of Oregon Track & Field lore say he always wanted to keep his runners “guessing” whenever he felt they were getting “comfortable.” He didn’t want “comfortable” runners, he wanted guys who had faced oodles of adverse challenges because as he said, he felt that the best runners striving for their best would always face adversity during their race. Comfortable runners would never find their very best because adversity is foreign to their bodies. So I just try to find that in my kids… at the end of the day, it builds character and that’s what I’m looking to give my SWAMIs as they move on in life.