Training program of hoogenband

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He's also kinda tall and can be found on Twitter. Share This set is followed by swimming with fists and catch-up drills. Afterward, when I do an easy freestyle pulling set, concentrating on technique, it feels like I'm floating. We have a saying on our swim team: 'After suffering comes progress. Room for Improvement In addition to the straight swimming sets, Hoogie also uses a variety of training aids, although not many.

Part of the workout about to , is drills. Pieter doesn't feel comfortable using a lot of equipment, but we do use Zoomers for freestyle and butterfly kicking, and monofins to work on his underwater dolphin kick. The basic kicking sets are done with a kickboard. However, the specific sets with fins or sprints are done without a board in order to work on body alignment.

Although van den Hoogenband is a double Olympic champion, he still keeps working on improving his stroke. Verhaeren explains, "If we look at Pieter's strengths and weaknesses, it's clear that he is not winning because of his starts and turns. We practice quite a bit on starts and turns to get them more consistent. They need to be decent in every race, not just when he's lucky.

Pieter's strengths are also very evident. Verhaeren believes van den Hoogenband's stroke, technically speaking, is among the best in the world. He also notes that Hoogie has a high physical endurance. Verhaeren likes to spend the last two or three months preceding a major international competition in training camps: "There you can concentrate solely on swimming while getting enough rest.

During competition, you always need to focus on your own race to swim the best race possible. That should be the goal of every swimmer -to improve yourself instead of wanting to win. From van den Hoogenband's perspective, he doesn't feel any stress before a major race: "I'm just focusing on my race and pumping myself up. Swimming is a sport in which you can't do more than perform at percent, so why should you worry? You shouldn't complicate things too much. Before the "big race," Hoogie likes to get plenty of sleep as well as finding enough time to prepare himself mentally.

Everything adds up to the final time, and the only thing that matters is the final time. But the way Verhaeren sees it, achieving your best "final time" still comes down to one simple, but critical element: "Even at this level, technique is still the most important.

We also try to learn something from every workout. Everything you do needs to have a purpose. I want to see the effect of every set. You can gain a lot of experience by talking to other coaches at meets. I can even get ideas by looking at the warm-up set of another swimmer. Following are sample workouts for Pieter van den Hoogenband. In , PSV Eindhoven hired Jacco Verhaeren, a young and ambitious coach, to take its regional- and national-level athletes and train them to become more competitive on the international level.

It turned out to be a golden choice. Among the 40 swimmers Verhaeren coached his first year was year-old Pieter van den Hoogenband. That year, Verhaeren implemented the same training program for the whole team. This resulted in eight swimmers participating in the European Championships. Never before did our team have so many swimmers competing at the international level. Swimming World magazine chose van. After Sydney, Verhaeren trimmed down his team even further-to only four swimmers.

We wanted to make sure our athletes will perform at percent again at the next Olympics, so we sought the help of four training specialists. Verhaeren meets with these specialists every eight weeks to discuss the current physical condition of the swimmers. They include professor of physiology Jan Olbrecht, nutritionist Joris Hermans, weight training instructor Luc van Agt and fluid dynamics specialist Wieger Mensonides-all considered to be experts in their fields.

Hermans also works with professional speed skaters and the soccer players of PSV Eindhoven. Exercises for dryland training are provided by van Agt, the fulltime weight training instructor of the PSV Eindhoven soccer team. We try to strengthen the individual weaknesses of the swimmers in our dryland program.