SSI (SWIM SCENE INVESTIGATIONS): SUGGESTIONS FOR CONDUCTING BASIC SWIM ASSESSMENTS


By Drew Surinsky, USA Triathlon Level II certified coach


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o one who requests a swim assessment is entirely satisfied with his or her stroke, meaning there’s a


swim mystery to be solved. Solving swim mysteries is an opportunity for creative and analytical thinking. Just as importantly, it can be fun and rewarding. When conducting a swim assessment, my


goal is to develop an understanding of the client’s stroke that’s both descriptive and evaluative. That is, I want to both describe the stroke and rate its effectiveness. As a coach, you already have an idea


of what you want stroke components to look like (catch, recovery, kick, head position, rotation, etc.) and some drills that you like, so I’m not going to mention those much. Instead I’ll describe a stroke


assessment procedure that will help you understand your client’s stroke, explain it to him/her and make some suggestions for improvement. One of your most powerful swim


assessment tools is the client interview. Before meeting at the pool, I like to have a fairly in-depth conversation with the client. Even many experienced triathletes lack the vocabulary to adequately describe how they experience swimming, so you‘ll likely need to talk a while for your client to express what he or she thinks his or her body is doing. We then schedule a meeting at the pool


and talk immediately before the client gets in the water. By this time your client has had time to percolate on the previous


discussion, plus something about sitting next to a pool seems to bring new thoughts to the surface. What comes up in these discussions will shape the assessment, and you’ll want to steer things toward activities that relate to the impressions you develop. The swimming machine is complex. Many


things happen simultaneously, they’re all relatively important and they all affect one another. So, in a swim assessment, I strive to understand each part of the machine from several perspectives: what is it doing on its own, what it’s doing relative to its co-part, what is its motor (power source), and what it’s doing relative to the HTU (hip-torso unit). The list following the next section should provide some concrete examples.


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