THURSDAY, APRIL 20TH WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19TH
This day’s schedule (as well as every Monday, Wednesday, Friday) is a jam-packed day for us! We arrive at the pool and start with our gymnastics warm-up, swim for 3 and a half hours, get out and rush to physical therapy, walk over to do our weights workout at St. Vincent’s, return for a few more hours in the pool and top it all off with an hour of landrill at the end of the day. After constantly moving all day, our bodies are pretty fatigued but getting stronger by the second!
In addition to our land weight training that we do, in the afternoon practice we completed our usual water weights set. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we do sets wearing weight belts with 1, 2, or 3 kilos and ankle weights. Generally we either practice our elements with weights or we swim chunks of our routine. This type of intense training helps us swim our routines with ease once we remove the weights. The weights make it hard for us to stay high out of the water and prevent us from moving as fast as necessary for our routines, so when we swim “normally” with just our body weight we feel close to invincible. This invincible feeling is something that we are hoping to carry over into all areas of our practice.
Today in the water our focus was on our lifts. One of our goals this year is to have impressive lifts that set us apart from other top countries, so today was a necessary step towards our success. Every Thursday four girls on our team participate in “flying class” to learn better techniques to propel themselves off of our bases and experiment with new acrobatic movements to do in the air. At home last night everyone brainstormed never-done-before ideas that we could try, so today at practice our goal was to pick a few that were successful and looked new and original. After hours of lifting swimmers stacked upon each other in innovative positions and propelling teammates into the air doing back flips and spins, our team took leaps and bounds towards our goal.
This practice day was another day for us to piece together the small sections that we have worked so hard on and push towards creating a total picture. Swimming this much of the routine at a time is very difficult so we were quickly exhausted, but our coach was happy with our progress and acknowledged the improvements we have been making. Fridays are usually the days when the physical stress of the week catches up with our bodies, so it was great to hear that we did a good job at something so difficult!
Before our weights workout this afternoon we sat down for a team Sports Psychology meeting with our therapist. We discussed goals, confidence building and qualities of a cohesive team. Altogether it was a great meeting to have as we approach the final weeks leading up to our first international competition. This team has never competed together before, so team unity and connection is vital in this beginning phase of our training. The more we can trust each other, the stronger our team will be and the greater our successes will be!
We carried this team motivation into our second practice and did great with every task our coach assigned. Our team is getting hyped up for the meet in Brazil and we are striving to give everything each and every practice leading up to it.
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JULY 2011
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FRIDAY, APRIL 21ST
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