Freestyle swim clinic

Posted on 29, March 2014

in Category Club News, Coaches Corner

In early February Swim Ireland ran a Munster Masters Freestyle Clinic. Breda Mcnamara, Mairead Coughlan & Andrea Newport attended the clinic which took place in UL. The clinic comprised of a morning of classroom sessions with the afternoon focus on the pool. The clinic looked at Core & Posture for Masters Swimmers. The quality of the 2 presenters was excellent, Catherine Hanratty from Lurgan & Jesus Perez NAC.

 

Catherine’s focus was mainly on posture in everyday life at home at work etc.. We had a great presentation of everyday bad habits and then did a practical session on some everyday exercises that help Masters Swimmers in particular. We did a great pre-pool warm-up work out with Catherine pool side, it’s something we should all be aware of before starting a pool training session. Watch this space!!

 

With Jesus the focus (and lets just say we were all very focused ;-)) was on core and using your core while swimming, in the pool warm ups. We practiced some interesting warm ups such as:

• swimming down the lane with your eyes closed; how far do you think you would get before hitting a lane rope ?
• kicking on your front but instead of your arms out straight fold your arms in front of you.
• freestyle catch-up, legs crossed behind you.

After all that hard work there was more to come and we worked on some great pilates /core exercises on pool deck.
Lets just say I think we all found our core’ss! Or fair to say lack of. I for one was reminded of that for 3 days after the clinic, yes – ouch ouch ouch. Some interesting documentation was made available including Warm Up workouts, Stretches & Exercises. We will compile some information and it will be made available here shortly.