Water Confidence Training

     Well it's the end of another week, and so ends another week of training. This post will cover mostly of what I cover during my water training sessions, more specifically our Wednesday workout this week.Water training for me is particularly difficult, due to UH's ridiculous free-swim hours at the pool, but I go whenever possible and try to make the most out of my time. I tend to go Monday's and Wednesday's from 7pm-9pm. It's then that my buddy Dan and I conduct our exercises.
     We started of with some breathing exercises  for about 10 mins to get our lungs warmed up, then moved on to the workout. The first exercise of all of our pool workouts is the 25m underwater swim. We do between 6-8 sets of this on a 1:30 interval. Each week we try to make the rest time shorter and shorter to work on lowering our heart rates and increasing lung capacity. We always have a spotter though, because these can get somewhat difficult and we've almost passed out a few times from going to fast.
     Next we moved on to treading. We used the egg-beater tread with our hands out of the water. We completed 2 sets of a 5:00 tread, with a 1-minute rest in between. These really destroy your legs, but are something that can always be improved on.
     Thirdly we went into drown-proofing. This exercise can be extremely difficult or extremely easy depending on how confident you are in the water. Basically, you tie your ankles together, then tie your wrists together behind your back, and you bob up and down consistently for around 10 minutes. As long as you stay calm and relaxed, it is pretty easy.
     Our last exercise is my favorite: the mask and snorkel recovery. This builds off of our 25m underwater. For this, you swim 25m underwater (no goggles) into the 17ft deep end, find your mask and snorkel, which have been tangled up, untangle it, put your mask on, clear the water, then controlled swim to the stop and clear the snorkel. (There are a lot more details but I won't bore you). These are one of the hardest evaluated events at Indoc. Simply because you need to swim all the way to your mask, use more air to clear t, then use even more air to blow the water out of the snorkel. I've posted a video below explaining.

Mask & Snorkel Recovery