Georgia Tech Men’s Swimming Off-Season Training

December 11, 2009

The Georgia Tech men's swimming squad goes through an intense off-season workout with coaching by Jason Benguche.

TRANSCRIPT

Jason Benguche: Today's week seven actually of our summer program for swimming and diving. So what I'm looking to do this week is kind of a traditional period where I'm going to allow the athletes to rest slightly. We're going to come in a do some different movements in the weight room; some more challenging stuff in some sense but in other aspects a little bit lighter in intensity.

The < a href="http://www.stack.com/squat">squat jump is basically explosive triple extension. Every race is going to start or begin with some kind of start off the wall, off the blocks. So we will train explosively, initially in all of our movements. But for the squat jumps today that was our main improvement, just central nervous system training in order to just get explosive hip extension training in the workout right at the beginning when they are some what fresh.

Some of the biggest things that I can help swimmers with here at Georgia Tech are descent shoulder prehab program, improving their core stability and core strength. Those are two things that we really, really try to improve throughout the year. In addition to that we will also do all your basic very traditional strength training movements in terms of improving upper body, pushing and pulling strength, and then in addition to lower body strength.

So we run the whole gambit but in terms of swimming performance, just keeping those shoulders healthy, maintaining the strength throughout the whole season. Overall benefit of the forward lunge shoulder press; what I was looking to do was combine not only the lower body in the lunging mechanic but also get comes shoulder strength and core strength by pushing the dumbbells up out of the lunge position.

It's a lower body push and also an upper body push so we're getting development of the shoulders triceps and upper body, and the lunge mechanics with the lower body. The tricep extension Today what I did was I left the choice up to them so the majority of them did it by choice. It's their favorite movement strengthening the back of the arm and their triceps. I actually liked that choice because it puts the dumbbell overhead and it trains the upper body to hold that position. It promotes really good shoulder flexibility if they can hold it.

Johnny Hagam: From today I really liked the lunge with the dumbbell press. That's a workout where you always have to keep your core tight and you're always going to have to be aware of where your body is at all times and that really translates to how you swim. I'd have to say that some of my least favorites tend to be some of the core exercises just because they can get tedious at times. You do so many of them you feel like they stop doing you any good after a while. But today we actually did some pretty good ones and we switched it up from what we normally do which felt pretty good.

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