Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Holiday Season

I hope everyone had a restful and wonderful thanksgiving. Although we still practiced on our own, we enjoyed our small break to see our family and catch up on school work. We have met our goal of completing all small routines by thanksgiving break. Today at practice we came up with new goals for our training trip. Its that time of year again where we start stressing over finals. Next week is our last week together before our short break where we will be given time to study and hopefully have the highest GPA of all sports teams on campus!
This week we are perfecting our first lap of team. We started today by breaking down the first hybrid. After watching tevo, we were able to see the greatness shining through. I'm proud to be on the 2010-2011 synchro team. It is clear we are destined to do great things with our talent, coaching staff and love of the sport.
Until next time,
~Rebecca~

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Figures

On Sunday we will be competing in our first meet of the season!!! It will be here at wheaton so feel free to stop by and lend a helping hand. This figure meet also includes age group swimmers which helps us build a strong relationship with club teams nearby.
For encouragement and to make the freshmen enjoy rather than fear their first time representing Wheaton Synchro, we were given a secret swimmer. This is a tradition on our team where we pull names of our teammates out of a hat for each meet. whoever we are assigned to we either make them a card and include a small token of our love at away meets or posters at home meets. Look out for those bright and colorful signs next time you stop by to watch our bright and colorful team!

Have a Happy Thanksgiving,
~Rebecca

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Its weight time

Recently we have started our phase 2 of our new training plan. This phase involves the use of weight belts throughout workouts and routine drills. By using the belts, we are becoming more aware of our alignment as well as strengthening our muscles so our height will be better than ever before. It has been a tough first week but I am very proud of everyone of us. Our team routine is being cleaned and reworked so that it presents our strengths as a team.
As many of you know we are hosting our annual figure meet on the 21st! in order to prepare, we have done many drills for each individual figure and for our basic skills that we can also apply to and figure group. The weight belts come into play here too. We started applying ankle weights while practicing figures in order to have more control over our legs. Although we are all tired the progress we are seeing is enough to keep us going strong.

Have a great week,
~Rebecca~

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Rest Week

Greetings,
This year we have a new training method involving different levels of training on a bi-weekly basis. After the "hard" weeks of strength building we have our ever so needed rest (recovery) week. For that week we get to come into practice at 6:30, which for us is a big deal. We also have a less intense workout and we use lighter weights for our land exercises. This program has been truly helpful for all of us because not only do we see improvement but we know what the overall goal is for each week.
At the beginning of the season we held tryouts for team and small routines, in order to keep track of our progression we had another day of trials. Looking back on our previous scores and comparing them to our more recent scores shows each swimmers enormous improvement. We are tested on swimming endurance (laps), vertical height/stability, eggbeater, spins, agility hybrids, push ups, v-ups, splits and arches among other things.
We are looking forward to our next two trials before competition season to see an even greater improvement!!!

Have a great weekend,
~Rebecca