All Access Swimming Practice with Sam Freas

Turn your limitations into championships! As Sam Freas puts it, "The art of coaching is to make the best of what you have."

Coach Freas started the swimming program at Oklahoma Baptist in 2012. In their first season of competition, Oklahoma Baptist men finished with four NAIA records and a National Championship and the women finished with two event championships and were national runners-up. In the first three years, the men won back-to-back-to-back NAIA Championships, while the women won two national titles (2014 and 2012). Over the span of his legendary tenure through 2019, Freas brought home 7 national championships as coach of OBU.

In this instructional swimming video, legendary coach Sam Freas gives you unfiltered access to all aspects of his program, including dry-land training, pool training, mental training, and work in the weight room. Watch as Freas takes you through 3 days of live practices featuring his morning and afternoon routine and showing how he has achieved world-class success both in and out of the water.

IN THE POOL
Throughout both morning and afternoon workouts, Freas emphasizes that good technique is the key to fast swimming. Some of the skills he highlights include:

• Getting "up" on the surface of the water to increase speed
• Fast turns and finishes into the wall
• Breath control and underwater work
• Proper head and hand position
• Correct shape of a kick and foot speed

Freas has his swimmers demonstrate drills on these topics and speak individually about how implementing small changes has dramatically improved their meet performance. His emphasis on proper body position, speed, quickness, and reduced reaction time is highlighted during his explanations, demonstrations and drill work with swimmers. In addition, his use of pulse rate of recovery rather than time intervals for swimming (and dryland exercise) is unique.

DRYLAND TRAINING
Freas takes you through his philosophies on stretching and flexibility, weight training, aerobic warm-ups, and reaction drills. He stresses the importance of incorporating each of these into a swimmer's daily routine to avoid injury and fatigue, lessen lactate buildup, and maximize meet performance. His programs emphasize both aerobic benefit and explosive contraction. This is important because drylands often neglect aerobic work and only include slow contraction, rather than explosive movement and speed of contraction which are needed for swimming success. Swimmers work individually, partnered, and as a group to demonstrate the effectiveness of these skills. Freas provides great strategies to take advantage of dry land and the weight room as a supplement to pool work to optimize a limited facility.

In addition to his focus on proper technique, Freas gives you insight on communicating with athletes at all levels. He discusses the importance of motivational "mental coaching" and how through positive speech and image you can prepare their swimmers to consistently perform at an elite level. The segments from his team meetings provide a wealth of information on how to communicate with a large group of athletes. By incorporating these tools into his programs at Arkansas and LSU, Freas's swimmers achieved seven US records and three world records.

Freas's experience and success in the world of swimming has enabled the Bison to develop a strong swim team with world-class athletes in their first year of NCAA swimming and diving. Coaches building a new program or looking to improve their current program will benefit from his guidance through three days of exemplary workouts and drills.

342 minutes (3 videos). 2012.

All Access videos are designed to allow viewers from all over the world to see how successful coaches run their practices in a "live" practice setting. All Access videos allow viewers to see the practices un-edited and in real-time. You will see how top coaches run their drills, interact with their team and staff, how they motivate their team, the cue words they use, the atmosphere of the practice and how practices are structured from day to day. Many coaches visit successful colleges and high schools to watch practice. But if you live out of state or out of the country, visiting another coach's practice can be costly. That's why we created the All Access Practice Series of videos -- to bring the practices to you!