We wrote the following to help you get an idea of what you can expect while your child is swimming with us at the Stroke School. This is the very beginning of your swimmers adventure in the sport of swimming. Even though your swimmer won’t be in Stroke School forever, the skills that they will learn here will serve them for the rest of their swimming career. TMEC is firm in it’s belief that technique should always come before endurance and speed. It is important to us that only swimmers who can demonstrate proper technique be advanced to the next group. This is to insure that your swimmer is ready for the skills that will follow.
Stroke School Swimmer Mission Statement
“I will hold my best technique and work my hardest at every practice”
Typical Stroke School Workout
The typical stroke school workout will go only 200-500 yards in 30 or 45 minutes. This is because the whole focus of the groups is on the stroke or skill that they are working on. Don’t expect your swimmer to be getting in great shape from stroke school workouts although he/she will be setting a solid technical base and building valuable muscle memory for future competitive training. This technical base will insure the best possible results in speed in the future as well as reduce the risk of developing repetitive motion injuries from poor technique.
·5 minute warm up - we try to keep this as short as possible while getting the swimmer blood moving and getting extra maintenance work on the previously mastered strokes.
·20 minute of drills building the stroke or skill - generally we will start to build the stroke from streamline then the kick and last the arms. Although a lot of the time we will simply pick up where we left of the previous day.
·5 minutes of review - it is imperative that each swimmer brings the lessons learned in each workout to practice the next day. We will spend a good amount of time reviewing and reinforcing the same skills day after day.
These workouts are kept short for a fast paced learning environment where swimmers might be getting out before they truly wish to, insuring that our swimmers will come back eager for practice the next day. We at TMEC feel that these short practices combined with a two week cycle stroke school system creates the most effective novice level learning environment.
Streamline school
In the streamline school swimmers will learn to master the body position that our whole sport is based on, the streamline. A swimmers ability to learn to kick properly depends on their body position if a swimmer is not able to use proper body position chances are that that swimmers feet will be deep in the water making it very difficult for the swimmer to learn to kick properly.
Kick school
In the kick school our swimmers will learn all four kicks while in streamline position. Keeping the front half of the body in streamline is imperative for swimming fast. For some swimmers the kick school will be very difficult. Breaststroke is difficult because an athlete needs to have total control of their ankles. Young swimmers do not always have control of all of their muscles. In the kick school the coach and swimmer will be able to focus a lot more on the swimmers problem with breast kick before we move on to the arms. If we move on too soon a swimmer may never learn to kick breast right. Although if we fix the swimmers kick now the swimmer will have a better opportunity to become a good competitive swimmer later on in his/her swimming career.
Freestyle school
Our swimmers are on the right track to learning his/her strokes and are now ready for the freestyle school. In freestyle school all the focus is on Free. During warm-ups swimmers will practice all four kicks so that they do not forget. In the Free school a swimmer will learn the stroke and turn, although most of the focus will be on the swim. After completion of the free school the swimmer will be allowed to compete in freestyle.
Backstroke school
We will teach backstroke second because Back is the second easiest stroke to learn. The swimmer will do all kicks as well as Free in their warm-up so that they do not forget. The swimmer will learn backstroke turns but most of the focus will be on the swim. After completion of Back school the swimmer will be allowed to compete in backstroke.
Breaststroke school
In the Breaststroke school swimmers will warm-up with all kicks, Free, Back and Fly if necessary. They will be taught open turns but the major focus will be on Breast swim. After completion of Breast school a swimmer will be allowed to compete in Breaststroke.
Butterfly school
In the Butterfly school swimmers will warm-up with all kicks, Free, Back and Breast if necessary. They will be taught open turns but the major focus will be on Fly swim. After completion of Fly school a swimmer will be allowed to compete in Butterfly.
Turn school
There are five turns a swimmer must know to compete, these are Freestyle and Backstroke Flip turn, Butterfly and Breaststroke open turn, and Back to Breast open turn. At this point swimmers will have been introduced to both free and back flip turns and both Fly and Breast open turns. The focus of the turn school will be the fine tuning of these turns, introduction and mastery of the Back to Breast open turn. In the turn school swimmers will warm-up all kicks and strokes so that they do not forget. The main focus will be on the turns. Upon completion of the turn school a swimmer will be ready to compete in the individual medley events, as well as move on to the first competitive training group.
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