Month: June 2021

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Staying positive – Get a Plan

Pt 1 – Planning for the 2022 FINA Masters World Aquatic Championships

Time has a habit of flying past, often at a completely unhelpful pace, and before you know, it will be time to leave for the 2022 FINA World Masters Aquatic Championships.

While the program for the Championships has not yet been announced, the dates have – 31 May to 9 June, so now is the time to start preparing.

With less than a year to go, the first step is to develop a training plan which focuses on your events.  For that focus and based on previous schedules, here are the anticipated event dates.

Anticipated program of events for the 2022 FINA Masters World Championships.

With those days and events in mind, here are mywaterworld.life’s first steps for designing that plan.

Initially, and in conjunction with your coach if you have one, you will need to identify and incorporate the following into your plan:

  • Dates of holidays and family commitments;
  • Events you will compete in;
  • A listing of your weaknesses in technique and conditioning for your events;
  • Elements of training that you dislike or avoid; and
  • Identify your favourite elements of training.  This is to ensure that when you design your plan you are not unconsciously incorporating a bias into your training regime.

There will be dates of competitions that are as yet unknown, so your eventual pan will need to be flexible enough to adjust for them.

Stay tuned and subscribe to mywaterworld.life for the specifics of planning over the next couple of weeks. Your planning will need to incorporate periodic recovery weeks. You will need to match events such as birthdays and swim meets into those recovery weeks.  The training cycle in its general and specific training phases is based on two, three or four-week rotations so it will be easy to incorporate important family and holiday dates into your plan.

As part of your planning process, you should schedule a general check-up appointment with your GP to address any medical issues you may have and request a blood screening.  Make sure also that you also organise your vaccinations, both covid and flu.

So now you have some homework to do! The next step will be to put together that plan. The way forward is to Subscribe to mywaterworld.life

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New – Training to Achieve an Outcome and Post Exercise Recovery

During the last week or so the Professional Development material on mywaterworld.life has been expanded by the inclusion of two new pages covering Post Exercise Recovery and Training to Achieve an Outcome. 

The material for post exercise recovery comes from the American Council of Exercise.  The paper covers areas including the physiology of post-exercise recovery, energy pathways, strategies to enhance recovery, the role post training nutrition plays, alternative methods of, and misunderstandings about, post-exercise recovery including the role of free radicals and antioxidants, and the practical translation of exercise, nutrition and training recovery research into practice.   Recovery

The revised section on Training to Achieve an Outcome currently only covers two types of training – Ultra-Short Race Pace Interval Training (USRPT) and High Intensity Training.  Both provide their own unique insights into intensive training sets.  The design of high intensity sets, including what are commonly called lactate tolerance and lactate production sets, are critical to the development of racing skills.
Training to Achieve an Outcome.

You can access our new pages directly from the mywaterworld.life Professional Development page.

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A view on staying positive – The pandemic and planning for the next FINA World Masters Swimming Championships

In May this year (2021) Masters Swimming Australia conducted a national Mental Health Awareness Month.  Mental health however is not an issue just for a month – awareness and mutual support needs a 24/7 focus.

We are all leading our lives in a world of great uncertainty.  Just as our individual lives were starting to get back to some stability and certainty in Australia, we now see the Australian State of Victoria in a 14 – day shutdown which commenced at 11:59pm Thursday 27 May 2021 and may even need to be extended further.

These uncertainties and lockdowns can easily crush personal ambitions and goals, but only if we let them.  Staying positive is always the best way to face each and every day.

It is easy to understand, based on our shared experiences over the last fifteen months or so, how quickly our lives can be adversely impacted and how dramatically and rapidly our swimming and training routines can change or even be completely denied to us.

The positive is that vaccination numbers around the world are steadily rising and without doubt, notwithstanding vaccine hesitancy, will dramatically improve by the end of 2021.  It is also not unrealistic to believe that by late 2021 or early 2022 we will have access to a range of new and additional medical enhancements including new antiviral drugs and rapid response medicines, some of which are already in the human trial stages.

Even now (3 June) there is discussion that fully vaccinated Australians may be provided some relief, all be it minor and subject to health advice, from the quarantine rules currently in place.   Trials of new control measures for travelling into and out of Australia may even commence this August, if not earlier.

Our new “normal” lives now need to adapt to living with Covid-19.  There are things that we can all do!  We need to heed and adopt safety advice from our public health authorities, get vaccinated as quickly as we can, and we need to stay positive.

Staying positive means preparing for the future, maintaining, or adapting our goals and ambitions, or even establishing new ones, and putting plans in place to make those goals achievable.

The next FINA world championships are scheduled for June 2022. The currently proposed dates are May 31 (Tue) – June 9 (Thu).

It is no use waiting for certainty and final confirmations of dates.  By the time certainty materialises it will be far too late to start planning and preparing.

If competing at those championships was on your radar, then NOW is the time to start planning.  Plans can always be adapted but first up there is a need to design a plan.  Get started and if you need some assistance in that planning then you can easily contact mywaterworld.life

While the program for the 2022 FINA Masters has not yet been announced, the dates for the championships have (see above). Next week mywaterworld.life will have a look at a possible program for the championships and share some tips with you on how to set up your plan. 

In the meantime, stay healthy and positive and think about some key dates for your plan.