A Fun Game for Your Winter Training
By Mauro Pacsi, Swimming World College Intern
By the time December comes around each year, swimmers from their club, high school, or college teams are accustomed to a certain tradition on their team. That tradition is commonly referred to as winter training. It is usually the hardest period of practice during the season and every swimmer goes through it differently. Coaches manage to draw up sets that somehow are harder than previous years and become less enjoyable as well. However, to spice up this upcoming period of training, I would like to share a game that my team and I partook in.
The rules are simple, and everyone can get a lot of variety while watching their teammates go through some of the most grueling swims of the practice. Everything is up to chance, which makes the risk just as great as the reward. Here are the initial rules for the setup of the game below.
How to Prepare
- Prepare a bucket filled with small pieces of paper. Each piece should have a different stroke written on it. You can also add fun variations of strokes such as double-arm backstroke or any kind of drill.
- Bring along a pair of dice. When rolling the dice, the numbers will decide the number of laps. You will add the numbers on the dice together for a total. For example, rolling a four and a two would equal six laps.
- If a pair of numbers are rolled, like two sixes, add both numbers together and double the total. So, you would add the sixes together, get twelve, and multiply by two to get twenty-four laps.
How to Set Up the Game in Practice
- Split your practice group into two teams as evenly as you can. For example, ten swimmers on Team X and ten swimmers on Team Y.
- Starting with the first swimmer on each team, have them pick out a piece of paper from the bucket and roll the dice. Whatever result they end up getting the other team will end up swimming. Let us say swimmer one on Team X gets three laps of free, so, Team Y will swim three laps of free. Meanwhile, swimmer one on Team Y gets five laps of backstroke, so, Team X will swim five laps of backstroke.
- After both teams complete their laps they should wait on the wall. The next swimmer in the rotation of picking on their respective team will pick from the bucket and roll the dice to determine the next set for the opposing team.
- The picking rotation and rolling will cease once one team completes one hundred total laps or more. The team that completes one hundred or more laps first is the loser. The reasoning of “or more” is because a team might slightly end up going over one hundred. If they do, the extra laps after lap one hundred become cooldown.
I hope this winter training game presents itself as a fun idea to try at some point in your training! If you really want to get festive, Christmas music in the background is more than welcome. However, do not think that it will be easy. The last time I played this, I ended up having to do close to forty laps of butterfly. Hopefully, you will not have that same experience or worse! Happy Holidays and enjoy!