Short Individual Medley (SM) Swim Training and Racing

Let's look at some ideas on a new swim training and competition category for individual medley (IM) events swum as long axis (LA - freestyle and backstroke) and short axis (SA - butterfly and breaststroke) stroke pairs in 25/25, 50/50, 100/100, 200/200 distances. These new swimming events would bring some excitement to our sport and offer new challenges for competitive swimmers. By incorporating more drills and practices with an emphasis on the similar axis stroke grouping (LA and SA), teaching the stroke techniques would be made more streamlined, more focused, axis specific, accelerated, naturally progressive, and more correctly taught. In addition, the muscle memory ingraining and co-ordination transfer would flow naturally from one stroke to the next.

In order to provide the above benefits to our swimmers, coaches could consider the following points:

• Teach drills so that common–axis strokes compliment each other.
  
• Give more sets in which swimmers alternate either freestyle-backstroke OR butterfly-breaststroke within the same set.
  
• Have informal team time trials or competitions offering short medley (SM) events in 25/25, 50/50, 100/100, 200/200 distances.
  
• Offer national and international postal competitions in the short medley events (an attractive proposition to be considered).

Can you imagine how exciting and challenging it would be if a competitive swim meet was based mainly around short medley, standard IM and relay medley events? I personally think that medley exclusive swim meets would contribute a great deal to the development of our sport.

SHORT MEDLEY (SM)

A summary of training/swimming development benefits and tri- energy system considerations:

• Age Group swimmers’ training based around the common-axis strokes approach will speed up the correct stroke technique acquisition process. Short medley (SM) events can contribute a great deal to that process.

• SM categories can be used to enhance 10-14 year olds Age-Group training programs by including them as a substitute to 100m sprint events. At this distance, the three energy systems (ATP, anaerobic and aerobic) overlap. In the 10-14 age group the anaerobic component of the energy delivery system is not yet fully developed. Therefore, there is really no logic in continuously trying to over-stress and over-stretch an energy system which is still in its biological development phase.

• By delaying the use of 100m events for 10-14 year olds, we may even hit the gold - i.e. by finding a partial answer to the early burn-out syndrome associated with our sport. For example, the energy system training associated with 100m events can be replaced with 25/25 SA or LA - the SM common-axis stroke events. 100/100 and 200/200 are other aerobic based SM combinations. The 50/50 SM event (100m event) can still be used (with short intervals between each 50) instead of 100m in sprint training.