Keeping My Mouth Shut

I think everybody has something that they're good at and it causes them physical pain to watch someone do it wrong in front of them. When most people talk about SEO and Adwords type topics it makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little bit because they are usually so incredibly wrong. I need to physically restrain myself from handing out throat punches.

Watching people swim at my gym invokes a similar reaction. I'm not a coach or a kinesiologist or anything fancy like that but I know wrong when I see it. Tonight the pool was just full of wrong. The thunderous 2 beat freestyle flutter kick, the front crawl hand slap, and the list goes on. *shudder* But I don't want to be that guy giving unsolicited advice in the pool. It's like that meat head in the weight room that comes over to critique your form on the lat pulldown machine despite your best efforts to not make eye contact. So in the unlikely event that any of you are readers... small fast kicks on your freestyle please, if you're making a huge splash with every other kick that's not helping you... also your hand should slide into the water not slap it, trust me.



... and I'm off my soapbox... sorry about that

Tonight was my second night of using swimplan for my workout. I had it generate a new workout but it came out suspicously similar to the one I did the night before. So I had it create another new workout that was more to my liking. After making some modifications to make it more appropriate for my pentathlon meet coming up I was off to the pool.

Warm up
100 freestyle
100 breast

Main set
50 free
50 fly
50 free
50 back
50 free
50 breast
50 free
50 fly
50 free
50 back
50 free
50 breast

(... at this point my shoulder starting grinding so I started cooling down to not hurt it)

200 free
100 kick
100 free

1200 yards total followed by a trip to the hot tub.

I think the stuff I'm getting from SwimPlan is good inspiration for workouts. I don't really dig the drills that they insert so I pretty much keep the yardage but drop the drill. The other thing that had been a little weird is that I only seem to get freestyle and breast stroke in my workouts from them. So I've been turning some of the freestyle portions into IM's or alternating through other strokes. I'm going to keep using them for my root workouts though and see where it takes me.

Trying Out SwimPlan.com

Ok so now that I have my open water distance race out of the way I need to start working on training for 50's, 100's and other short to medium distances. So far I've been winging it with my workouts. I decided to give a site called swimplan.com a try. It generates custom swim workouts based on the strokes, distances, and time you want for your workouts. Plus it's free, yay! I signed up this morning and tonight I took my first workout with me to the pool. I did however make a few small mods to the workout. Here's the workout I ran through tonight:

Warm Up
2 x 100 freestyle (kick every 4th 25yd)

200yd freestyle alternate drill/kick

Core Set
4 x 100 freestyle with approx :20 rest

4 x 100 IM with approx :30 rest

4 x 100 freestyle with approx :20 rest

Cool Down
4 x 50's easy(I did 2 breast, 1 kick, 1 free)

2000 yards total

I'm going to try using the swimplan workouts for the next week or two and see how it goes.