Hi! My name is Coach Topolski. I wanted to show you in a short video how to use a couple pieces of equipment to help your swimmers get into an exercise, a dryland exercise that's very easy and very important. I'm going to use stretch cord. I bought a lot of surgical tubing, that's one of the staples of our program, and I've found some paddles, some that we use, and you can use any hand paddle you want that's flat. It doesn't have to necessarily be flat, and you can drill a hole in there. In the middle here -- and I am going to show you quickly by putting some surgical tubing through the paddle, I am just going to tie a little knot, and you can vary the size of the tubing and the length of the tubing, because you want to do a narrow, a medium, and a wide pulling exercise with the surgical tubing.
I'm not going to cut these, because I already have about ton of paddles that we use at various lengths, so the swimmers can just take the paddle up that they want to use, and use them. You could put a little slipknot; obviously you can use the same one piece of cord at various lengths, so I can go like this, a little slipknot in there. Take it out when you are doing it. Now this exercise is done for breast stroke and butterfly, and it's critical that swimmers get to pull-apart, with some strength.
And this exercise is done for the time, for a time limit that you decide is important for your swimmers, and what is nice about this kind of tool using these paddles, versus just holding a piece of stretch cord like this and using it in this kind of motion to work on your pull-aparts, for breast stroke and butterfly, is that it doesn't hurt, because a lot of the younger swimmers, a lot of the 9-10-years-olds complain that it hurts their -- and even some of older kids complain that it hurts their hands when they do our pull-aparts, and we do it like this without locked elbow, elbow above their head of course, sliding in front, to mimic as closely as possible the actual position that they are doing in it when they are swimming, and they do this for a certain amount of time, then they will do it a little bit longer, where the pull is wider, and then they are going to do a one that's actually pulling quite far apart.
Well, take your paddles, drill a hole in them, or use the holes that are already available, and put it at the length you want it, and you can put your hands here, it's kind of neat, because like I said, our team does these dry-lands all the time, every single day, that we have practiced and we pull-apart. You go to failure if you want, you can go to one minute and ten seconds, you can vary the diameter of the stretch cord to make it harder or easier on your kids, but this is just one thing that you can use to help your swimmers get a little faster. It's a easy piece of equipment to make, doesn't necessarily have to be a paddle but we use paddles, and it doesn't have necessarily be any certain kind of paddle, it just has to have a couple of holes in it, and that's it.
I think you will find that these paddles are going to help, or this piece of equipment should help your swimmers get stronger on the pull-aparts, for breast stroke and butterfly. Do them all the time, every time you have practice in your drylands, and I hope you have been developing a dryland exercise program that you do religiously along with the early vertical forearm exercise everyday to become faster at what you do on that swim. This little thing is being brought to you by the Techpaddle, or Early Vertical Forearm trainer, and I hope everybody buys one, and wish you all the success in the world. If you have any questions, please email me at tomtopol@NetZero.com or at thomas.topolski@gmail.com, another one of my email addresses, or you can become my friends on Facebook, and you can become a friend of Techpaddle and Coach T. Thank you very much, good luck!
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