Program Design – The Michigan Women’s Swimming Experience

I am presently at the University of Michigan working on designing the dryland training program for University of Michigan Women’s swimming. This will be the fourth year that I work on this. It has been a very good experience because Jim Richardson, the coach, gets it. He has a great background in physiology and biomechanics. Unlike many swim coaches he is not looking at dryland training as another way to hammer them. He recognizes that the gains they make out of the water can reflect in improved streamlining in the water and a reduction of injuries. We spent nine hours yesterday analyzing the past three years programs and refining and revising the program for this to reflect what we have learned and the cumulative adaptive response. The challenges moving forward is to have the swimmers that have been through the program for three years to continue gain training adaptations. To achieve that objective we have made some significant changes in the sequence of the training phases. The incoming freshmen will have a beginning program. We also will do more in the water tensiometer strength testing. An interesting side note that Jim pointed out yesterday is that there have been no shoulder problems in the last three years. I tend to take that for granted, but in swimming that is unheard of. I think that is because of the constant emphasis on linkage of hip to shoulder, extensive rotational core work and the correlation of the dryland work with the actual swimming.