Qualities a talent should have (part 2)

Today I'm going to continue yesterday's post on the talents a swimmer should have and improve. Today's post is about the physical qualities and the anatomical characteristics.

Physical qualities

This group of talents accounts for the swimmer's physiological engine, its efficiency, and its intelligent use. These qualities are what most people think of when they hear the term swimming talent.

• Feel for the water. This is kinesthetic sensitivity, in particular on the propelling surfaces of the hands, arms, and feet. Swimmers with feel can do a new skill or change an old one on the first or second try, and they can keep doing it correctly. They intuitively understand how their bodies work in the water, and they can feel the difference between what works and what doesn't.
• Recoverability. Swimmers who can recover quickly from one practice to another can work hard more consistenly than the rest, and as a result, they get more benefits from training.
• Endurance. Age-group swimming training is founded on endurance. Being able to maintain good speeds for long periods of time is crucial. Long-course swimming relies on endurance more than short-course, and longer races rely on it more than short ones.
• Speed. We want to swim fast, we want to train fast, and we want to race fast. Fast, of course, is relative: different races and strokes demand different amounts of endurance and speed, but all swimming speed depends on power and coordination more than on simple brute strength.
• Pacing. We want swimmers with a precise sense of pace who can allocate their resources for a race. This is the difference between the kids who go out fast and fade badly, or those who have too much energy left at the end. This talent requires self-control, which means that both physiology and psychology are important.
• Health. Swimmers who are sick or injured all the time cannot train consistenly and have trouble improving.

Anatomical characteristics

• Swimmer's body. A coach's wish list would include swimmers who are lean, strong, and tall - long arms, long torsos, big hands and feet, wide shoulders, and slender hips are ideal. This talent encompasses the size of the body and its parts as well as their proportions: the swimmer's conformation. This does not mean that a swimmer not born to this ideal cannor be successful.
• Flexibilities. Flexible swimmers have optimal ranges of motions in the key swimming joints, especially the shoulders, back, ankles, knees, and hips. Often children are not uniformly flexible or inflexible; there can be big differences from one joint to another. Also, ranges of motion change as children grow because bones, muscles, ligaments, and cartilage do not grow in tandem and at the same rates.

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