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Linking Seasons - Building From one Season to the Next
By Wayne Goldsmith | In Coaching Tips
It’s a fact. Most swimmers don’t link seasons.
Most swimmers look at each season as an end in itself; as a destination rather than another part of the journey.
If you were driving to New York from LA, you would find the most direct and efficient route and drive there in logical steps, each one progressively closer to your ultimate destination, resting when you needed to along the way, but always heading west.
It wouldn’t make sense to try to drive LA to New York making 50 mile detours north, south or east at the end of each day meaning you then had to start each new day further away from your destination than you were the day before.
You work hard to improve each season. You earned your improvement! Your improvement this season is the starting point to improve next season.
Your swimming career should something like this:
A linked progression of improvement over the seasons of training and competition and always heading towards your ultimate goals.
Unfortunately, many swimmers’ careers look like this:
Whilst there is overall improvement over the swimmer’s career, progress is relatively slow owing to the lack of effective linking of one season to the next.
Linking Technique #1: Short Course = Long Course
One way to link the seasons is to aim to make your short course personal bests from one season your long course goal times for the following season.
For Example:
2005-2006 winter short course season personal best times:
- 100 Free 1:06
- 100 Back 1:14
- 200 Im 2:55
- 400 Free 4:51
2006 Summer long course season goals:
- 100 Free 1:06
- 100 Back 1:14
- 200 Im 2:55
- 400 Free 4:51
Then for the following short course season, the process starts again.
Linking Technique #2: Flag times
A really great way to link long course and short course is to use flag times.
This means, your coach takes your flag time during your long course races and notes the time your head got to the flags the final time before the finish.
For example:
Long course seasons personal best times (hands on the wall)
- 100 Free 1:06
- 100 Back 1:14
- 200 Im 2:55
- 400 Free 4:51
Long course season personal best flag times (head at flag)
- 100 Free 1:02
- 100 Back 1:10
- 200 Im 2:51
- 400 Free 4:47
Short course season goals (hands on the wall)
- 100 Free 1:02
- 100 Back 1:10
- 200 Im 2:51
- 400 Free 4:47
Then, once you achieve the short course season goal times, you can use Linking Technique number one (Short course personal bests = long course goal times) and start the process over again.
Linking Technique #3: Skills Links
Your personal best time is made up of many other “times”.
For example:
- The time it takes you to get from the blocks to your feet passing under the starting flags (start time)
- The time it takes you to get from the flags in to the wall and back out to the flags again when turning (turn time)
- The time it takes you to go from the finish flag to the wall (finish time)
- The time it takes from hand touch to foot touch, i.e. the time between your hands touching the wall and your feet touching the wall in breaststroke and butterfly turns (hand touch, foot touch time or HTFT)
You can use these times to link season to season.
As a general rule, age group swimmers should aim to improve around 2-3% per season in overall personal best times but…this can be a result of relatively large improvements in the skills.
For example:
| SEASON | EVENT | START TIME (seconds) | TURN TIME (seconds) | FINISH TIME (seconds) | HAND TOUCH – FOOT TOUCH (seconds) |
| 2006 Actual Skill Times | 100 fly | 3.5 | 10.4 | 4.3 | 1.2 |
| 2007 Skill Goal Times | 100 fly | 3.2 | 10.2 | 4.0 | 1.0 |
In this example, the swimmer improves 0.3 of a second in their start, 0.2 of a second in their turn, 0.3 of a second in their finish and 0.2 of a second in their HTFT making it an overall SKILLS improvement of 1.0 second for the event.
So think long term, but act short term. Plan the progress towards your long term goals by effectively linking your improvements each season.
Wayne Goldsmith
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