Regular readers may recall a few blogs in the past three months about my wife and how she has started doing some regular exercise, even doing her first triathlon in early March. Since her triathlon she has continued doing her regular exercise, slowly increasing her load and continuing to progress. It has been impressive to watch.
Of the three disciplines of triathlon, the one that my wife has been least comfortable with has been swimming. She hasn't swum a lot in the past and so it has been the leg with the steepest learning curve for her. She isn't afraid of the water or anything, but there has been a significant period of getting comfortable with the idea of swimming.
Over the past few months her swimming has progressed from barely being able to swim a few lengths to doing 1000m sessions a couple of times a week. Now that her training has progressed to the point that she getting though some longer sessions we thought it might be time start working on technique. The only question was where should we begin.
We were a bit unsure for a few sessions, I know a lot about swimming, but that doesn't necessarily make me a good analytical coach. However, after some pondering we realised that the solution was staring us in the face. The answer was the Swim Smooth Guru.
Looking at the Guru the first thing we needed to determine was what swim type my wife was. We had some suspicions, but to help narrow it down the Guru has a very handy questionnaire. After my wife did the questionnaire it indicated that my wife was a Bambino (What is a Bambino I hear you ask? Have a read of this Bambino)
The questionnaire was pretty solid, and as I said, the result was expected. However, in order to confirm the swim type we also thought we might do a bit of our own stroke analysis. So with that in mind we headed down to the River on Saturday morning, my wife armed with her bathers and me armed with my GoPro.
Filming my wife and analysing her stroke was a really interesting process. Upon looking at her swim it was clear that she is doing a lot of things right, however, it was also very obvious very quickly that she was indeed a Bambino. As with most swim types, she didn't fit every single characteristic of a Bambino (her body position is quite good for example, with no sinky legs) but she fit the Bambino description well enough that it was clear that the diagnosis from the Guru was correct.
Now that we have that confirmed diagnosis, it means that the direction of her swimming for the next little while if beautifully clear. The Guru gives a series of sessions for each swim type that can be used to help people improve their strokes. It gives a structured plan for each of the sessions, including which drills to do, how much to do of them and a description of how to do them. While no two swimmers are the same, the Bambino program will certainly help my wife in the major areas she needs to work on, primarily connection with the water through the stroke.
Working through the program won't miraculously make her a superfish, but I am hopeful that with a bit of time and dedication it should improve things dramatically, which will give her a new basis to push on from.
A very cool training tool indeed.
PS And no, I won't be publishing my wife's analyse videos, I value my life more than that.
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