1 ARE THERE PENGUINS IN THE TROPICS?
Yes. More than in the Arctic.
2 I’M GETTING A MACRO ERROR?
Cool coach uses Excel macros. Especially on a PC, you have to shut off your macro protection. A former swimmer of one of our authors of Cool Coach helped out with this method of making sure everything is as it should be in this time of Microsoft protection madness: “ .
3 PRINTING
It takes a little practice, but Excel allows you to print on multiple pages and that looks and works great on your pool walls. I often had to use a rolling while board eight by four feet and use one side for Tracking and best times and the other side for practices, etc. But swimmers realy respond to having those sets poolside.
4 WORKOUTS!
Notice in the Cool Coaching Book there are something like 16 workout types. Your style and strategy can vary — just remember to track yourself and your swimmers — if they are fatigued by Thursday, maybe back off in total stress in the first three days of the week. One early warning is the resting pulse. You’ll notice inthe attendance sheet there is a place to put resting pulse. Need the modality? Just e-mail us.
5 JUST FIVE MINUTES A DAY?
Yes, except for the day you write the week of workouts, which should take no more than an hour. Here’s some hints:
1.Have swimmers get used to doing their own averages in test sets with averages. For example, if you have thirty swimmers dong 3 x 100 back flutter@ 3:00 and a swimmer goes 1:15. 1:12. 1:14 — let them tell you 1:13. The tenths don’t matter and it doesn’t even matter a whole lot if they tell you 1:14 or 1:12. The next time they do it they will be gong after whatever they did this time and the other swimmers tend to keep each other honest. What you should do is go down your list and ask each swimmer his average.
2. But, having said that, if a swimmer doesn’t improve his average you have the option of not writing it down. When you go back to your computer, just go down the list and put in the improved ones. Just focus on improvement. If you have a large number in the group who aren’t improving you now get to figure out why. As hard as that sounds you are far ahead of most coaches who have no idea how fast their kids can kick, especially all thirty of them.
3. That update should take less than five minutes since on a great day you might have twenty improve. I like to enter mine, but remember that anyone can do that, even the swimmers in the right environment — a computer in a room before they leave, etc.
4. Every set is a test set — but you don’t have to actively track all the time. For example, from the last example — if you know your swimmer averages 1:13 for anaerobic flutter kick and you’re gong a set of 50’s or even relays of fifty’s you can compare that to see how hard they are working, and where appropriate to give reinforcement. You can also do that to know when you’re going to have the best chance for positive reinforcement using a track set. The idea is to shift the line of best fit in between times you track – by any means — fins, vertical kicking, swim bench, dryland core work, etc. If they don’t shift there aren’t many options — either they are too tired and haven’t fully adapted, or the stimulus isn’t working. Again, it’s not easy to have a day when tracking shows less improvement that you’d like, but it’s far beter to know in November than in March taper, etc.
5. Either way, it’s just five minutes a day to track and I let it go for a few days and then catch up or have someone else do it. If you have a laptop, any smart volunteer can enter the numbers and let Cool Coach calculate the percentage improvement.
6. One last thing about workout construction — the more workout weeks you write and the more you like in terms of their balance and shifts, the less time it takes to open those and change them. For example if you have a great six weeks of a training cycle that was dominated by freestyle, you might open those weeks and change them to mostly speciality, just adjusting the stress, etc. If you have a great three week taper you loved last season, you can just open that and build this season with just the adjustments you want. So, getting it the way you want it might take some time, but once you have it you can reproduce it a lot easier even if each swimmer responds a little differently to specific training stress.
6 WHEN IS 4.0 COMING?
We’re actually looking for people to help us write it as a standalone. We really like Excel, but we are so video based, we want to take advantage of that. So there is a little time to wait. We’re adding movies in both the physiology sections and the biomechanics sections. We’re interfacing with the computer parts of the Swim Bench. We want our iPods and phones connected too and we’re working on that. The cool thing is that everyone who buys Col Coach from now on gets a free update to version 4.