A client asked me an interesting question the other day. We were discussing strategies to successfully Negative Split in a race situation. Real quick…a “Negative Split” is where you get faster as you go. In other words, you do the 2nd half of the event faster than the 1st half. It’s a time-honored method to get your best performance. But it’s challenging. It takes strategy, experimentation & commitment.
Hands down the hardest part about Negative Splitting is starting out slow enough. Basically, if you start out slow enough, you can always get faster as you go. To rephrase…to go faster at the end, you have to start out slow in the beginning. And this is strangely difficult.
One of my suggestions to start out slow is to drill. My client responded by detailing the focus point that she planned to use. I countered by saying that drilling & using a focus point are very different! And here we are… Just what exactly are the differences?
Drilling
Drills are essentially a way to isolate a specific part of the whole for the sole purpose of practicing it, exaggerating it and/or focusing on it. Sports (and many other things like playing an instrument) are made up of highly complex movement patterns which seamlessly fit together into a coordinated whole. That coordinated whole also moves at incredibly high speeds…speeds much too fast for us to adjust.
For example, think about running. In running your right foot leaves the ground & then contacts the ground again all in a matter of milliseconds. If you want to change the way you right foot moves through the air, good luck doing that while you are actually running! This is where drills come in handy.
When you do a drill, you are focusing in on one particular piece of the puzzle. We isolate & then slow that motion down in order to change it, modify it, adjust it. By repeatedly practicing this isolated movement in the new way we start to make it automatic. When it becomes automatic (i.e. we don’t have to think about it as much) we can then integrate it back into the whole…and the complex movement pattern is changed.
Focus
Focus points differ from drills in that focus points are often used while doing the complex movement pattern. Our goal is not to break the movement down into bits & pieces, but rather to subtly influence the whole movement pattern with something that will generally make it better.
In my running example…while running you can think about elbowing the person behind you. This focus helps the arms track in a more front-to-back pattern as well as helps the body weight shift forwards. Again, the goal is not to change a specific piece, but to overall have better run form.
Both techniques are important…especially if you are trying to improve technique. But back to my athlete & Negative Splitting. Here’s what I suggested for her swim:
- 1st 1/4 of swim – Drill with a Fingertip Drag & roll to Sweet Spot (her back) to breath
- 2nd 1/4 – EASY swim…it should feel like “la, la, la, la, la…I am so relaxed & calm”
- 3rd 1/4 – Swim on regular pace
- 4th 1/4 – Haul your hinny home!
And…it worked great! She had a really good swim time AND she felt great at the end!! Can’t ask for more than that!