Ultra-short Race-pace Training (USRPT) is a set of swim training principles researched, developed and articulated by Dr. Brent Rushall during his decades-long career coaching swimming and performing scientific studies. The results of dozens of tests are posted in his database "Swimming Science Bulletin" and I would refer you to this short article as a primer, "The Mechanisms of Ultra-Short Training". If this is not adequate in depth I would advise the longer, "Swimming Energy Training in the 21st Century". These methods have been proposed for water polo before (Water Polo Training Based on Game Metrics) but had previously failed to incorporate the optimal development of the players' energy systems and the reduction in performance-degrading fatigue. Now, a true scientific conditioning system is ready to be unleashed on your players. (Just in time for the season!)
Now that you have mastered some of the basic head-up drills in Head-up Water Polo Technique Part 1 you can start training your transitions. In a water polo game you will perform a water polo transition from swimming to eggbeater, or vice versa, at least two times each possession.
From your defensive end, you will perform a water polo start and swim to the offensive end where you will transition back to eggbeater. You may catch a pass early in the counterattack and then pass and swim to another position. You may also initiate a drive in your half-court and end the drive by kicking-up to catch a pass and score a goal. As you can tell, transitions are extremely important to work on. Fast transitions allow you to: 1) play mobile defense 2) counterattack quicker 3) pass and shoot from a stable and high eggbeater position 4) save energy.
Let's try some transition drills that will help you get in shape for the season.
Transition technique 121 is a simple drill to add to your water polo conditioning. Instead of swimming laps and starting and stopping on the walls, begin and/or finish each lap with some eggbeater. On an eggbeater start, make sure you are balanced with your hands out of the water and explode into the swim position with a forward breaststroke kick lunge. To finish, work on getting your knees up quickly and eggbeatering hard to the end of the lap.
Transition technique 122 adds some game situations to the eggbeater transition. If you start eggbeatering at the beginning of the lap you are in a shot-blocking position with one hand up and your palm facing the shooter. Knock down the shooter after a few yards and explode into your swim with a breaststroke lunge. If you finish the lap in the eggbeater position you should transition to eggbeater about 7 yards out and move forward high in the water with a shooting hand up looking for a cross pass. Finish the lap with a high shooting motion. If you eggbeater before and after the swim you should be sprinting head-up the middle 10-14 yards of the pool.
Transition technique 123 is a variation of technique 121. Here you will start from various positions and facing different directions. Face left, right, backwards and forwards. Start with your legs pointing in different directions as well. Each direction requires different explosive movements. Finish the laps with hard eggbeater for 5-10 seconds and at least one vertical lunge. It is up to you to make this drill harder and harder. 8x15 yards head-up sprint with 5 seconds of eggbeater at the end and 2 vertical lunges is a pretty good set! Take 20 seconds of rest between each rep.
Transition technique 124 shows you three types of water polo turns. Remember, when training for water polo you should never start with wall pushes or do flip turns. Save those for swim season. The ankle turn involves lifting your foot and leg out of the water and spinning. Notice that if you spin clockwise you will be pushing your right foot out of the water. Keep your legs high in the water and get proficient at turning both directions. The knees-to-chest turn is straightforward; just pull your knees up as high as you can and fall backward into a swim position. The hip turn is hard to master but is a very quick transition move. Watch the video and practice these turns until you feel comfortable. Proper turns will help you conserve energy in a game!
Many of coaches talk about the delegation of responsibility they give to their team captains:
"When a captain tells you to do something he speaks for the coach"
But, when do your captains actually speak with your vision? Usually, this is the last expression of delegation a coach will ever give to players. As a coach you should be delegating a portion of your practice to be run by your captains. Your captains need opportunities to practice their leadership skills every day. Coaches should provide the guidance, tools, and feedback necessary to build daily improvement. This will pay dividends in games when your captains are authoritative in executing your plan.
College coaches are not exempt. Your captains and seniors are moving into the real world. These skills are not only essential but will benefit your players the rest of their lives. If you, or the assistant coach, are running warm-ups, conditioning, or basic drills by the second week of practice you are wrong. Coach staff should be correcting individual technique and coordinating team strategy. Captains should be enforcing proper repetition and pace. If ROTC college seniors are qualified to lead men into combat your players can run the first 45 minutes of practice.
First, establish a precedent for your captains. Give them a few orders to execute such as organizing team stretching and having everyone in the water at a certain time. If players are still on the deck, pull the captains out and hold them accountable (usually push-ups, make it hurt). Show the rest of the team that the captains are the conduit between the coach and the rest of the team. Essentially, the captains should be doing the heavy lifting, and yelling, during the mundane portions of practice.
Second, bring your captains into the daily planning of the the practice. Have them stand with your assistants as you disseminate the plan for the day. What is the conditioning plan, what is the major focus of the practice? Are there any recommendations from the captains based on play the previous game? Let them feel their input is important in building the team.
Third, talk only to your captains. This is the hardest step. Stand over your captains and give them the next drill. No yelling, no loud talking, just a normal conversation. If players are lost when the drill starts pull the captains over and ask why. Are they leading the drill or expecting inexperienced players to know what to do? Captains should be vocal and learn to relay any information you give to them. Again, this will pay dividends in crucial game situations. In ROTC, the leader is given 10 minutes to accept, develop, and disseminate a formal operations order to their subordinates prior to leading a 90 minute mission. Your captains will be fine.
My leader expectations are straightforward:
Communicate—up, down, and laterally; understand the practice
Build agile, effective, high-performing teams
Empower subordinates and underwrite risk (playing creatively)
Develop bold, adaptive, and broadened leaders
Your captains will thrive with the latitude you have given them. I usually transition my next year's captains/seniors the last week of season to give the current seniors a chance to focus on enjoying the end of season. This also gives the juniors a taste of what is to come.
I have trained men who have seen combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Building water polo leaders is easy but still equally rewarding. Many players have committed significant portions of their lives to play water polo and, as a coach, you should enable them to lead men in this short profession as well. Your captains will never resent you because you let them lead.
"The fastest learning occurs when there are challenging and
interesting opportunities to practice leadership with meaningful and honest feedback
and multiple practice opportunities. These elements contribute to self-learning,
developing others and setting a climate conducive to learning."
Previously, we looked at creating a daily water polo practice plan using backward planning based on identifying a tactical goal for the practice. In this post we will look at the other two parts of overall planning by creating a mid-term (operational) and seasonal (strategic) plan. Refer to Creating a Water Polo Practice, Part 1 for guidelines and terminology.
Your weekly plan should take into account your total available pool time, dryland time assigned to the week, and games scheduled. Let's look at three common situations: Hell-week, pre-league weeks, and league weeks. Create tactical goals that will build throughout the weeks and can be supported by your pool schedule and player experience. Sessions can be broken down into conditioning, water polo skills, dryland, weightlifting, scrimmaging, and any smaller combination of these parts.
Hell-Week 1: Usually 5-6 days of practice with 1-2 sessions each day.
morning: weightlifting, evening: conditioning
dryland, conditioning
conditioning, water polo individual skills
weightlifting, conditioning/individual skills
conditioning, group skills
group skills, center-based offense
H-week 2
weightlifting, conditioning
individual skills, zone-aware offense
conditioning, press defense
group skills, zone defense
counterattack, scrimmage/6-on-5
Now lets look at a non-league week. This will usually consist of 5 practice days and 2-3 morning sessions. It can also include a non-league game or Friday/Saturday tournament.
conditioning, set offense
counterattack, zone defense
conditioning, 6-on-5/5-on-6
game warm-up, zone-break offense, after-goal situations
Game/Tournament
League weeks usually are the last month of the season and are broken up with two games separated by practices days. This creates a challenge to build a consistent plan but also allows coaches to make adjustments after games to build on skills for the next game. A sample week includes:
conditioning, defensive schemes
league game
counterattack, offensive schemes
league game
individual and group skills, after-goal situations
The end of the week is a good time to reinforce fundamental skills. Players are tired and more focused on the weekend. Drilling individual and group skills depends less on tactical thinking and more on mechanics and a limited number of actions. If your players are broken-down from the week their performance in team skills and scrimmages will probably be poor and inefficient, frustrating both players and coaches. Know their limits and plan recovery days that allow for mental recovery.
Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the USAWP Coaches Clinic in Riverside, CA and was honored to have lunch with the coach instructor, Dante Dettamanti. We discussed many topics over the 2-day clinic including offensive and defensive schemes, practice plans, and good-old polo stories. But, most importantly, we discussed creativity.
FINA is trying out some new rules this weekend at the Fisher Cup (San Diego) Men's NT scrimmages and FINA Intercontinental Women's NT scrimmages in Riverside, CA.
Some of the rules will open up play and allow for more scoring opportunities. 5-on-5 play will change how both offenses and defenses run their half-court tactics. This will be the most interesting aspect of the experimental rules. Women using a size 3 ball will just frustrate the poor goalies who will, likely, be yelling at their field players for better shot blocking. I haven't seen anything that specifies how the "no-ordinary fouls" will be executed but that can be a big game changer as well.
The rule change that is most intriguing here at Beyond Water Polo is the playable open areas to the sides of the change. I doubt these areas will be used a lot as I haven't seen much use of the 2-meter area outside the pipes at the international level.
But, what if Wayne Gretzky were to draw up a power play for USA this weekend. Would it look something like this:
This is a completely abnormal motion for a goalie in water polo. Hockey goalies know how to hug the post as the puck moves behind the net but how will a water polo goalie react? I would recommend that the winger waits until the goalie realizes the ball is behind the goalmouth and looks back to the middle of the pool, then make the cross pass. A good winger will look into the middle of the pool and "eye fake" the defense before making the pass over the net. Ideally, every defender is looking right and doesn't see the opposite wing dropping into the new zone.
I hope Team Canada doesn't see this.
Follow us @BeyondWaterPolo for live tweeting of the USA-AUS experimental rule scrimmage on Monday (May 19th) at 6:00 PST.
Head-up swimming for water polo is an essential skill taught to every player beginning the game. It is the equivalent of skating in hockey or running in soccer. With proper head-up technique you can swim almost as fast, over short lengths, as a streamlined freestyler. However, poor technique will significantly slow you down and lead to increased fatigue during games and practices. Learn the correct technique the first time and jump ahead of your opponents. For more advance technique see the water polo transitions in part 2.
The first obstacle to overcome when developing your head-up technique is the fact that you are raising your upper body out of the water but you still need to keep your feet high in the water and not drag them.
Drill 101: Scull Swim Flutter Kick will keep your legs in the correct position. Perform this drill to the halfway mark in the lap and transition to head-up freestyle while keeping your flutter kick at full speed:
Now, we want to work on our stroke and a long arm reach. Strong head-up swimmers do not rotate their bodies the same as fast competitive swimmers. In competitive swimming, you roll your shoulders above and below your body. In water polo, you want to rotate your shoulders in front of and behind your head. This is a flat rotation. Drill 102: Single-Arm Head-Up Swim will teach you to reach far in front of your body while keeping your head out of the water:
Let's work on some more body rotation in the next drill. Swimming backstroke for a few yards will come in handy on offense, defense, and during the counterattack. Drill 103: Front-Back Swim will teach you to move your whole body more effectively:
The final drill to develop your new head-up swimming skills is Drill 105: Zig-Zag Swim. This drill is simple: Swim one way then swim the other way. Make 90 degree turns and work on reaching out to begin each stroke. This will also use your transition skills from Drill 104. Bring your legs up quick and use the eggbeater lunge to start each turn:
You're not done! This was part 1 for a reason. There are many more drills to improve your head-up swimming. Next time we will add a ball.
