Hell Week

I grew up with a fear of Christmas break or as many swimmers call it "Hell Week," as we would start adding up our yards (laps) in the hopes of going further than any team in recent history.  That turned into a sick appreciation of having gone through a swimming ritual that every swimmer must go through and as I made the move to a coach, I even began my career passing many of those fears and workloads on to my swimmers.

 

I have changed.  Unfortunately, I have understood how training works on a scientific level for quite some time, however, we are creatures of habit, and what worked for me, or what my coach did, must be the right thing to do, right?.  Stepping out and changing something is much harder than falling back on what most do.

Also, I got to a point where my teams were coming out of the Holiday's so tired and worn out that they were not able to swim practices at a high level, getting sick, accumulating injuries, and their overall health was taking a hit.  It seemed like we were taking the month after the Holiday's just trying to get to taper, rather than being in full control and executing some great workouts.  It is important to know that my teams were willing participants, we were all on the same page, as we were doing what everyone else is doing, so it must work, right?

If you are a coach or a parent heading into the Holiday's, think about these things:

1.  "Tough" practices can be completed, but you also have to give them time to adapt and recover from those practices.  Mental Toughness is always used to justify these practices, however, the athletes mindset turns to just completing these sets which is much different than the race itself.  Be mindful of what you are trying to accomplish with your team.  How a set is swum is much more important than how far or how hard it is to complete.  If work is too hard, an athletes ability to recover will be impaired, negating the possible benefits of the training effect. Unlike a type of fatigue that develops training effects, these holiday sessions often push far past the benefits of any desirable training effects.

2. Take time to teach over the Holiday's.  There is so much that goes into fast swimming and there are so many things to fix when I watch a typical high school or college swim meet.  Use the extra time to teach something, fix something, teach your team to do something better.  Now is the time to teach proper mechanics on the starts, turns, stroke mechanics, how to warmup, warmdown,........

3.  The logic behind these holiday camps are often explained with anecdotal evidence that claim to test a swimmer’s limits physically and mentally. It should be noted that often what a coach says and what is completed at training is not necessarily what is done by the swimmers (Stewart & Hopkins, 1997).

4. It should be noted that there has yet to be any scientific literature that promotes the idea of drastically changing a training plan due to a holiday. Coaches must remember that the objective of training is “to progressively and systematically increase the training stimulus to induce superior adaptation and, as a result, improve performance” (Bompa, 2009).