We have been inspired by various ideas from coaches Salo, Marsh, and others who are using various methods to make their swimmers race harder through specific components of their race. The idea is to help swimmers improve wall speed (in and out), improve dive/breakout speed, and other details. The rough concept we learned from Salo is that the swimmer can kick to a point in the pool (i.e 15 meter mark) and drop a weighted object. As they drop the item, they have a limited time to flip and get back to catch the item before it hits the bottom of the pool. Marsh also showed us how his swimmers toss an item out in front of them from the blocks and then dive to recover it before it hits the bottom. Of course there are plenty of variations to this concept that can be used. But we wanted to have a device that could be changed to control the rate of decent to account for different distance and challenges. Frankly we worked on designing our own ‘underwater rocket’ for this purpose but found a much easier way that anyone can make their own version.

>>Eric