Swim-Golf is a great distance per stroke game you can play with your kids. Some coaches call it Swolf. I was first introduced to it years ago by my friend and fellow coach, Paul Mazzarelle. It seems crazy to me that someone wouldn’t already know about this and perhaps that is why I never thought to post a blog about it. However, there are plenty of new coaches out there, like myself when I began to use it, and maybe some old ones that have never heard of it.
This week I talked to the kids about counting their stokes and trying to take the least amount of strokes per lap possible. Then we talked about tempo and how it relates to DPS in terms of overall speed and time. At that point we jumped into playing the game. I explained to them that there is a magic equation to fast swimming:
Optimum DPS + Optimum Tempo = FAST SWIMMING!
Swim-Golf is a tool to help them understand this concept...And it is a lot of fun. Here is how you play:
-Have the kids swim 25 yards (or 50 meters) and count their stokes.
-They also need to get their times when they get to the wall.
-Take the number of stokes and add that to the time it took to swim the lap and you have your score. Obviously, the lower the score the better (that is where the golf part comes in). So, if Johnny gets 12 strokes for a 25 yard free and his time is 16 seconds, his score is 28. After a lap we talk about how we can improve our score and we go again, and again, and again. We go over every possible way to potentially bring the number down, including streamlining farther, pushing off the walls harder, breathing less, and a whole bunch of technical things that the kids understand as time improving, distance per stroke enhancing ideas.
This week was a little different. I had the kids in teams. We took the total score from each swimmer and added them up for an entire team score. The team that had the lowest score won! I thought this team-game was a lot more fun for the kids than the individualized version. Either way, this is a great way to teach the relationship between DPS and tempo and how faster, more effective swimming is really done.
Any one else play SWOLF?
This is one of the standard test sets we run. It's a highly creative way to teach stroke efficiency. Haven't done the team version, though. Sounds fun!
ReplyDeleteI have used swolf with Masters swimmers, but my kids have trouble reading accurate times off the pace clock. I have had success with sets like 9X50 fr descending stroke counts 1-3. It's great fun having the kids call out their final stroke count after the 9th 50. Big Bobby looks with astonishment at tiny Tina who had a very low stroke count. It is at that point that Bobby is very receptive to stroke technique instruction!
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