Swim Class

Today was interesting. We started off by doing serpentine for a warm up. Starting at one end of the pool and swim the short-course lane. When you reach the end, move one lane over and swim back. Repeat until you've swum through all the lanes and reached the other side of the pool. Since short course is 25m and there are 20 lanes, you swim 500m.

Some people didn't start at the wall if they didn't think they could make it. I did it, but it wasn't easy. I was sucking wind by the end. I thought about doing flip turns, but I was afraid I'd run into the guy coming after me.

After this we broke up into groups of 5. We had three groups and each group went to a different station. The first one was in the shallow end where you did leg work. You would run up and down the pool, or go sideways. You could pair up with someone and throw a ball back and forth as you travelled. I paired up with a girl who grabbed a medicine ball and we went back to back and passed the ball from side to side. The hard part was I kept slipping on the black lines. You could also grab a kickboard and run holding the kickboard in front of you in the water for extra resistance.

The next station was in the deep end. You alternated between jumps and wall crunches. You would do 10 jumps where you crouch down all the way on the bottom of the pool and then spring up as high as you can with your arms overhead. It's to practice your wall push-offs. You'd follow that with 20 wall crunches where you hold the edges of the pool and use your abdomen to lift your legs so you can touch the rail with your toes.

The final station was also in the deep end. You were to do vertical kicks or sculling to stay up. Some of us grabbed a ball and threw it back and forth to each other as we kicked in place.

We did each station for five minutes and then rotated. The idea of the day was to show us alternative means of getting exercise in the water. We didn't do any swimming stuff other than the warm-up, but it was a fun class.