Surfing Waves

So I’ve been teaching my daughter to surf. She’s grown up here in Bali and has been around the water her whole life; free time as often as not is spent at the beach and she’s been swimming since she was a toddler. Anyway, she joined a swim club earlier this year and a couple of months ago started training with the top group. She has started changing physically already, can see her shoulders and chest development and while she was never fat she’s skinny enough now we have to push her to eat extra to keep up with the calorie output. Anyway, I was impressed with their usual practice schedule and wanted to share:
20 laps around the building running to warm up
500m swim warm up
250m arms only swim
250m legs only
8x200m freestyle - 20sec breaks
4x100m freestyle - 20sec breaks
12x50m sprints - 20sec breaks
500m cooldown

Now I know she can swim like this the next thing is to teach lifesaving to her as her sister and some open water survival things. Exciting to see kids grow.

I thought my swimming instructor was a little overboard because we did 80 laps as a warm up. I am guessing this is like the norm these days or maybe even less than the norm. But all this and then surfing on her off time she needs to be careful of repetitive use injuries

Swimming is the best thing for child development I believe, and is crucial as a basic skill. The kids that do sport swimming take it to the next level, and tend to have the most physically gifted bodies for almost any other sport, I may be biased as a swimming teacher myself but it is true! I picked up surfing very fast even though I couldn't surf more than 60 days a year at my local break, and this is purely because of swimming (and of course more practice and movement replication than I could count haha), so getting your kids swimming is the best thing for them, as much as everyone wants their kid to rip the surf they may have other ideas!! Swimming keeps their doors open through their childhood years, good on her

You have a great daughter and it's good that she has been doing this since childhood.

That practice schedule sounds pretty heavy. Varsity practice wasn't even half that many laps back in the day. I probably wouldnt have come back up from one of those flip turns
My old coach had a clever trick to get us in better shape.. had us play Water Polo as an "off day" on Holidays and i think that actually helped my swim fitness as much or more than our regular swim routine. But I usually only competed in the 50 & 100m so i guess that was part of the reason. Anyway it seemed like another really good crossover sport for surfing/lifesaving.
Sounds awesome that she's so into watersports

Naeco78 wrote:Sounds awesome that she's so into watersports

Island life….