And so it begins

I had my first practice with my new coach Kristen on Friday.  It was awesome to finally have someone there to analyze everything and give me some drills and advice on how to fix things up.  There were some aspects of my swimming that I thought were decent, but in fact need a lot of work - and vice-versa.  I actually thought that my backstroke wasn't too bad, but turns out that it's pretty ugly.  Ok, really ugly.  I was over-reaching and my kick was way too big.  We worked a little on getting my arms in the correct position and fixing up my body roll, which I'm still having a lot of problems with.  I got into the pool today and spent just about the entire hour and a half on my backstroke.  When I concentrate on the body roll, it feels really out of control and my stroke begins to break down.  I'll work on it more this week and hopefully with practice it will feel a little more natural.  My freestyle kick is too bendy at the knees, so I'm working on keeping my legs straighter and kicking more from the core/hip.  My breaststroke kick is also in need of work - I'm leading too much with my knees, and that is going to take some serious time and lots of drills to get that looking better.  Much to my surprise, my butterfly and flip turns aren't too bad!  Happily surprised about that.  (So Mel, maybe I'm really a butterflyer...)  I will have practice with her again on Friday and I am planning on getting in the pool each day this week to practice.  I'm hoping to be able to hit up the pool during lap swim in the (early) morning, and then do some lifting/cardio/crosstraining in the afternoon or evening.  All-in-all, the practice was great (to quote Kristen, "...everything is fixable") and I'm so excited to work on making improvements!

If anyone has any drills that help with backstroke (pretty much any aspect of the stroke) or breaststroke kick, I would love to hear about them!