Training Overview

To see training progression chart please click here.

Lower Merion Aquatic Club offers a wide range of training levels with the hope our swimmers will benefit from a cumulative, progressive and systematic development of their physical and mental skills. Ideally we begin with the youngest swimmers (4 years old) and lay the foundation for almost two decades of competitive swimming (if they swim through college) with complete emphasis on teaching the technical aspects of the four competitive strokes. From there each level involves the swimmer increasing attendance and commitment to the sport. In turn, the coaching staff offers each swimmer more specialized physical training as well as mental and emotional guidance so that they can perform at their highest potential and balance their own swimming career within their lives. The overall LMAC program goal is to use this systematic progression to ensure that our swimmers reach their peak performance levels at the correct time in their development (high school and college as opposed to as a 10 year old).

The progression begins with our developmental program, featuring the long standing Mighty Mites group and the new Mighty Piranhas, who are a bit older and still need a low key, less rigorous training atmosphere in order to succeed as an older age group swimmer and beyond. These groups focus entirely on developing the proper swimming technique and showing young swimmers that swimming is fun. It is critical that all swimmers begin with a strong foundation and that means learning the correct way to swim each stroke before trying to swim fast.

Once the swimmer is ready to compete on a regular basis in several events (various strokes and distances), they are ready for the age group program. These groups, Silver, Gold and Senior White, continue the athletes’ progression through competitive swimming by increasing commitment (attendance) and training with more intensity both physically (longer training sessions) and mentally (visualizing races, learning mental toughness with regards to competition). Children will continue to fine tune technical aspects of all 4 competitive strokes and add starts and turns for those strokes plus the Individual Medley. Age groupers have the greatest capacity for aerobic development and so practices will begin to feature more volume at times in order to prepare our swimmers to reach their greatest potential as senior swimmers.

Having been through the developmental and age group trainings, our Senior Blue swimmers are ready for a strong commitment to the sport of swimming. These swimmers have the strictest training regimen, featuring up to six in water and two dry land sessions per week. These sessions include a variety of physical, mental and emotional components, including but not limited to: rigorous aerobic and anaerobic training sets, race preparation sets, goal setting meetings, visualization of competition, test sets to monitor season progress, advanced stroke/turn drills, season planning (peaking at target meet(s), power/strength training.

Please click here to see a chart with Lower Merion Aquatic Club’s training overview. It is meant to give a snapshot of the requirements, goals and inner workings of each group and will show percentages regarding how much practice time is spent training vs. working on technique. Please understand it is the coaches’ philosophy at LMAC that technical proficiency and efficiency in swimming is of the utmost importance and therefore represents a major focus of the team at all levels. To accomplish this, the coaching staff will utilize several strategies at all training levels, including: underwater video analysis at practice, specific sessions featuring stroke/turn/start drills, pulling out swimmers during training sets at certain times to address/correct a persistent problem, watching training videos and recording races for later review by swimmer.