Michael Brooks' Principles of Swimming Series

with Michael Brooks,
Weymouth Waves Head Swimming Coach;
former King Aquatic Club Head Coach;
former York YMCA Swimming Head Coach/Director of Competitive Swimming;
4x YMCA Short Course Nationals Coach of the Year ('10, '12, '13, '15);
2x Middle Atlantic LSC Senior Coach of the Year ('14, '15);
coached four National Junior Team members and 2 National Team Members

Michael Brooks, Weymouth Waves head swimming coach and four-time YMCA Short Course Nationals Coach of the Year, delivers a superb instructional video that will help you develop a successful technique teaching approach. Brooks' approach is simple and practical, even for coaches who are relatively inexperienced!

The Unique Demands of Swimming

Coach Brooks reviews the many challenges and limitations swim coaches face that coaches in other sports do not. Acknowledging these challenges and being prepared to outline them for parents and swimmers will help you establish the shared role coaches and athletes have in the swimmer's success. A coach can create opportunities for learning, but only swimmers can make it happen!

Create Conditions for Optimal Learning

A swimmer who is distracted or discouraged is not ready to get everything he or she can from a practice, no matter how brilliant the practice design. Successful coaches learn to develop the four cardinal qualities of an optimal mindset:

• Engagement - Learn strategies to engage swimmers in what you are doing.
• Self-Reliance - Help swimmers become less reliant on the coach for motivation and advice and more proactive about reaching their goals.
• Focus - Understand the coach's role in helping athletes develop the crucial skill of maintaining focus.
• Water Feel - Understand what "water feel" actually is and how swimmers can work on it every day to be successful.

Teach Swimmers to Diagnose Stroke Flaws and Create Solutions

Swimming is a "feel" sport. Coach Brooks will teach you how to incorporate "Feel Sets" - sets that take advantage of the constant feedback water provides - to recognize problems and move toward a more efficient stroke. You will:

• Understand how to use video in a meaningful way to help your swimmers recognize optimal swimming and spot problem areas.
• Understand the difference between Variable and Random Sets, and how using them can help build water feel more quickly.
• Design sets that build balance and awareness by challenging swimmers to focus on a particular aspect of their stroke and get a sense of how it changes as resistance or speed change.
• Learn how to use equipment to improve error detection or to build sensitivity.

In this video, Coach Brooks argues that coaches must embrace the adage, "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime." Instead of pointing out stroke flaws and imposing solutions, you'll see how to teach your swimmers to diagnose their own strokes and help them to find solutions they will actually incorporate. A stroke improvement is not learned until the change holds up under training and then under racing conditions. By empowering your swimmers to be engaged, self-reliant and focused, you will develop swimmers who continually learn and improve!

68 minutes. 2020.

with Michael Brooks,
Weymouth Waves Head Swimming Coach;
former King Aquatic Club Head Coach;
former York YMCA Swimming Head Coach/Director of Competitive Swimming;
4x YMCA Short Course Nationals Coach of the Year ('10, '12, '13, '15);
2x Middle Atlantic LSC Senior Coach of the Year ('14, '15);
coached four National Junior Team members and 2 National Team Members

Weymouth Waves head coach Michael Brooks delivers a video that will provide you the courage and the confidence to break away from old-school practice design. Instead of spending time learning and then swimming drills at the expense of fitness, your swimmers will build technical expertise and develop conditioning at the same time!

Motor Learning

Dive into the base of Coach Brooks' instructional method with his breakdown of various motor learning principles. He begins by explaining that in order to reach peak performance, swimmers must remain patient, possess a model as a standard of reference, and "show" rather than "tell". Brooks builds up his principles of motor learning until you can observe how they apply when training a full stroke.

"Random" Practice

While the word "random" may not be welcomed by coaches who like to stick to a set schedule or system, Coach Brooks offers a compelling case for why "random practice" breeds maximum skill growth for swimmers. You will hear Brooks break down the benefits of random practice before moving to the pool for some in-water demonstrations on how to train an elite freestyle swimmer.

Motor learning is something that all swim coaches should look to master, in order to benefit their program and their swimmers as individuals. In this video, Coach Brooks offers up the initial steps to his motor learning program to help get you on the right track. Coaches of all levels will find great value in this presentation.

80 minutes. 2020.

with Michael Brooks,
Weymouth Waves Head Swimming Coach;
former King Aquatic Club Head Coach;
former York YMCA Swimming Head Coach/Director of Competitive Swimming;
4x YMCA Short Course Nationals Coach of the Year ('10, '12, '13, '15);
2x Middle Atlantic LSC Senior Coach of the Year ('14, '15);
coached four National Junior Team members and 2 National Team Members

Michael Brooks has experienced plenty of success as a swimming coach, and in this video, he provides key insight into some of his preferred training methods that have helped him craft championship swimmers. You'll see Brooks covers variable practice and why it's an effective approach, tempo trainers that produce a strong stroke, and progressions that put various techniques together.

Variable Practice

Coach Brooks begins by explaining the benefits of variable practice vs. constant practice. You'll learn how to teach your swimmers to intelligently control the choices they make in the water and also discover how to give swimmers more opportunities to make good choices.

Building up to the ultimate goal of stroke mastery, Brooks explains how through motor learning, swimmers can explore their skills, their distance per stroke, their stroke rate and pace. Additionally, he covers how to steer swimmers away from their natural tendencies when those tendencies cause problems and make their technique worse.

Tempo Trainer & Progressions

When using tempo trainers, Coach Brooks aims to have all skills in a stroke come into sync. He shows how you can work to calibrate the stroke to fit your tempo. In the pool, you'll see an example of a freestyle tempo trainer that aims to produce a longer stroke, plus more.

Also included by Brooks are some of his preferred training progressions. You'll learn progressions for loading, including how to add speed, resistance and volume to a swimmer's load. Balance and feel in the water, as well as timing, propulsion and body line are addressed and Coach Brooks explains his best progressions to improve distance per stroke, stroke rate, and race pace.

This is an excellent video that will elevate the effectiveness of every stroke your athletes take. No question about it - Coach Brooks is an expert - and his experience is here for your benefit!

122 minutes. 2020.

with Michael Brooks,
Weymouth Waves Head Swimming Coach;
former King Aquatic Club Head Coach;
former York YMCA Swimming Head Coach/Director of Competitive Swimming;
4x YMCA Short Course Nationals Coach of the Year ('10, '12, '13, '15);
2x Middle Atlantic LSC Senior Coach of the Year ('14, '15);
coached four National Junior Team members and 2 National Team Members

Michael Brooks, head swimming coach of the Weymouth Waves, delivers an in-depth presentation that hits on how you can maximize your swimming practices, improve your swimmers' dryland training, and incorporate periodized skill training into your normal routine. As a four-time YMCA Short Course Nationals Coach of the Year, Coach Brooks has solidified his status as an expert in swim training!

Maximizing Practice

Practices are by far the greatest opportunity that coaches have to affect swimmer learning and improvement. Coach Brooks maintains that if your swimmers don't look the way you want them to look when in the midst of competition, then the blame falls on your shoulders as a coach for not teaching effectively.

In this section of the video, Brooks lays out how to perfect practice execution, format, and prioritization. You'll gain a variety of philosophies for how to best train your athletes in groups and as individuals, plus see how to juggle training swimmers of varying skill levels at once.

Dryland and Periodizing Skill Training

Traditional exercises do not always translate directly into fast swimming. You'll learn how to design a dryland program that develops the skills your swimmers need using motor learning principles. This will help your swimmers waste less time and learn their technical skills more quickly and safely.

Finally, Coach Brooks lays out his best methods for periodizing skill training. This is broken down into a few main parts:

• Skill phase
• Coordinating phase
• Sharpening phase

This video from Coach Brooks gives you insight into the most important aspects of swimming practice, dryland training, and periodized skill training. Add it to your library today!

71 minutes. 2020.

with Michael Brooks,
Weymouth Waves Head Swimming Coach;
former King Aquatic Club Head Coach;
former York YMCA Swimming Head Coach/Director of Competitive Swimming;
4x YMCA Short Course Nationals Coach of the Year ('10, '12, '13, '15);
2x Middle Atlantic LSC Senior Coach of the Year ('14, '15);
coached four National Junior Team members and 2 National Team Members

In this video, you will delve into the "Stroke Catechism" - the key focus skills for each stroke that every competitive swimmer needs to perfect. Coach Michael Brooks incorporates motor learning principles and practice design strategies in order to introduce the what of his system. His catechism is the result of thousands of hours of coaching and video study that results in a short list of key skills. Learning them and training them appropriately will make your swimmers faster not just today, but tomorrow, and on race day.

The Catechism for Each Competitive Stroke

Coach Brooks explains the key skills swimmers must master in each stroke to maximize their performance. These are not wordy explanations swimmers tune out. These are short, evocative phrases that help swimmers learn what the strokes should feel like when done correctly.

Using the Catechism with Athletes

Brooks addresses why swimmers benefit most from doing the right things at the right time and at the right intensity. In this video, you will see why the power of the catechism incorporated into a motor-learning theory approach is so powerful! Reasons include:

• Swimmers will come to know the catechism, so they'll understand what the coach wants without long-winded explanations.
• If a swimmer loses focus simple cues - verbal or gestures - you can help them get back on track.
• Swimmers are required to work together to make practice work - helping with focus and team-building.

Incorporating Other Skills Using the Same Principles

Combining technique improvement and conditioning in every practice leaves more time for development of other critical skills such as starts and turns. Using the same motor learning principles, Coach Brooks discusses how and how often to work on these skills in a way that promotes mastery and confidence on race day.

In all, Coach Brooks teaches you to give your swimmers the tools to simultaneously build technical excellence and superior conditioning. Each swimmer will learn to become their own best stroke coach by developing a true understanding for how each stroke should feel. They will also build a mindset to get the most out of each practice so that optimal learning can occur. Excellent technical performance, when it matters most, will ensue!

87 minutes. 2020.