Straight in at deep end after holiday
HELL Week might make a tough enough effort to get back in training sound worse but to those at Cairns Stingrays Swimming Club, digging in to finish it is a badge of honour.
After enjoying a month’s break on the back of the Queensland Swimming Championships, the Stingrays have been back at it making a splash at Woree Pool as some work towards the upcoming national titles.
Nathan Grant has been head coach at the club for four seasons and said the concept was not only getting swimmers back into their routines, but building the team bond.
“This is something we started this year and it’s just an intense week,” he said.
“Generally, the older swimmers, they normally train eight sessions a week but it’s ramped up to 12 sessions in the last week of school holidays with all the afternoon sessions being three hours long and the morning sessions being two hours long, so it just starts their training back in towards the nationals cycle.
“Then we get back into normal training when they go back to school.
“They’ll have days they feel a bit flat, but at the end they get a shirt to say they survived Hell Week.
“If they get through that, they feel they can handle anything when they go on to nationals.
“It sort of moulds them to become a bit better as a team as well.
“The other morning we had a big speed set and they were motivating each other and cheering each other on.”
Grant was a junior Stingrays swimmer and said spending a good amount of time out of the pool was important to keep swimmers interested rather than the tedium of “going up and down that black line all the time”.
“But it also provides another avenue of aerobic work for them,” he said.
“It gets them working muscles they might not always use, but the work is sustained.
“To go on the bike for 40 minutes, that would be easier than getting in the pool and swimming for 40 minutes and works them aerobically as well.”
Grant hoped the new initiative would take more swimmers further on the back of a successful state titles.
“We had our best states results since I’ve been coaching at the club and I think it was the best result for the club in the past 12 years,” he said.
“We had six finalists, three reserves for finals and we got our first state medal.”
Grant said the building blocks were in place to ensure swimmers who wanted to reach the same level could do so with a bit of hard work.
“We’ve got a lot of wellstructured carnivals and we’re on a new Swimming Queensland carnival layout, and I think it’s preparing kids for the big meets as well as giving juniors a better opportunity to stay in the sport for longer.
“We have Junior Dolphin carnivals for the development of our young swimmers – five, six, seven, eight – and it’s really focused on the grassroots, working up from the bottom.”
While the name “Hell Week” makes it sound scary, the intense return to training is a common theme in the Far North and somewhat of an incentive to make sure athletes are doing what they can to stay in shape in the festive season.
Research suggests that young athletes who are able to compete and train at a high level are a naturally gifted group whose musculoskeletal system is intrinsically well endowed. These athletes have a low rate of injury.
Those at the sub-elite level, however, who train intensively to reach the elite standard, may not be so fortunate and may suffer serious injuries.
Children have a significantly lower aerobic and anaerobic training capacity than adults. As a rough guide, a child aged around 14 years can manage about one-third of the training load of an adult.
Plan to incorporate a mixture of aerobic and anaerobic exercise in children’s training.
No doubt hard work and discipline at an early age will lead to success but enjoyment of sport will increase the likelihood of the individual continuing activity as an adult and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
The correct balance needs to be made.
DESIGNING TRAINING PROGRAMS FOR CHILDREN ISN’T A CASE OF SIMPLY REDUCING THE INTENSITY OF THE SAME EXERCISES YOU PRESCRIBE TO ADULT ATHLETES
David Arnfield is a Cairnsbased sports trainer for elite and semi-professional athletes.