By SwimSwam Partner Content on SwimSwam
Courtesy of Athlee, a SwimSwam partner.
Freshly announced Team USA head coach Braden Holloway has a reputation as a tough taskmaster, having become infamous for his pull-up challenges during a near 14-year tenure as head of the swimming and diving programme at NC State. But, despite this renown, Holloway, who will lead Team USA into the 2025 World Championships, is no ‘school of hard knocks’ disciplinarian. He’s a modern, forward-looking coach with an eye for continuous improvement, a drive to win and a taste for technology.
Conversing with Holloway when he is fresh back from the NCAA Championships at Washington State, he is enthused about his experience there. He also shares some enlightening insights about how his coaching team prepare the different genders in the NC State ‘Wolfpack’ for competition. This is something that will prove of particular interest now that USA Swimming has announced that it has broken with tradition by naming Holloway as the singular coach of both the men’s and women’s teams for the Championships.
“Our women will do a higher yardage mark for aerobic, as they usually hit the higher aerobic energy systems longer,” he says. “In interval work, their amount of work to rest ratio is, is different than the guys. For power output, the women are literally going longer. If I’m doing 16 strokes resisted with a guy, the women might be at 24 strokes. On the sprint side of things, the men will average a whole extra recovery workout compared to the women.”
When it comes to Holloway’s interest in swim tech, it is all about seeing beneath the surface of the pool and exploiting the advantage that witnessing every exhale, shift or stroke can bring. The water may be thick or choppy from above, but dropping a camera inside the pool allows him to notice every nuance and encourage his students to upend their thinking. “When we teach our swim camps, I always tell them to not think so much about pulling water, but to think of it more like you’re holding on to it and moving past that point,” says Holloway. “You’ll see a swimmer lose that hold, and the bubbles or vortex change. It’s immediate. It’s something you just can’t catch like that from above.”
Swimming discipline is built on repetition and discipline, but Holloway does like to mix it up so that his teams at least have some variety when it comes to warm-ups. This gives a sense of the new, but he also believes it allows swimmers to recognise what works best for them.
“The warm-ups are different every time,” he says. “For me, it lets them learn ‘hey, I really do well when I use this smaller parachute, or the aqua socks like so’. They’re doing something different, each time, they’re starting to gather information. It’s the very start of better practices.”
When it comes to spotting future stars, Holloway’s innate sense for a winner is his most valuable asset. Experience means he can spot potential, but picking the ones at a meet that have the means to go further than the rest is very much a reflex. “I love watching people swim relaxed,” he says. “How quickly can they catch a stroke? How much do they hold the water? Sometimes the stroke mechanics are unique, but it has to be efficient. That’s the big thing that I like to see at a younger age, because then you’re just putting stress loads on top of it to try and make it better, through volume, or through rest. But I think the foundation of having a good catch is essential. And then I always look at kicking. I mean, there aren’t many elite swimmers who aren’t naturally good at kicking. If you think kids have it, that’s something you can build on, and it’s the easiest time to do it.”
Holloway believes that using underwater cameras can aid his scouting process, but then he was an early adopter of the tech. Although, like many coaches, he had to adapt what was available, with varying degrees of success. He has now been using the Athlee camera in his coaching set up for two years
“Way back in my career, we had an underwater camera hooked up to a TV, so I put Saran wrap on the TV and I would use a Sharpie to measure the distances and then time it on my stopwatch,” he says, smiling at the memory. “You just had to improvise, because any time that you can give the swimmer visual feedback where they can actually see ‘oh, this is better’ then you are bound to make something stick. Exact data alongside positive feedback is always something that they’re going to feed off. Sometimes you have two swimmers side by side and one just nails it, so it’s as simple as pointing to the footage and saying ‘do that’. To me, that’s fire. The different delay settings are key, for me.”
As well as aiding his students, Holloway believes that using an underwater camera helps bring him back to the principles of swimming, reminding him why he coaches for a living. It simply helps to reaffirm the basics.
“If I’ve been working on something for a while and I’m starting to see it work, it gives me a fantastic feeling to have got over that hurdle,” he says. “On camera, you see it get a little bit better, then a bit more and then, hopefully, you get there and it’s great – that reminder of the foundations of swimming. Things like knowing frontal resistance is not good, and that’ll never change, but how do we minimise it? I think that’s why it’s so beneficial with this camera, as it’s so easy to just move the iPad and the camera down the pool to where everyone gets a look. The camera is easy to set up and break down, so having that flexibility is great and its definitely the easiest for using with multiple kids.”
So, with all this high-tech learning, is there still room for Coach Holloway’s out-of-pool work, in the shape of his notorious pull-up routines? It appears that there is, starting at sets of three and growing with the team’s lats and traps.
“Yes, we still do them, although it is our strength coach that runs them now,” he says with a grin. “Everything is so back-driven that if you can do solid, strong pull-ups you’re probably going to have good relational and correlative strength in the pool. We usually do a total team number, say 500, and the team breaks that up how they want, so it becomes a strategy and team-building exercise, too. It’s all part of the whole picture.”
It just goes to show that new technology and traditional methods should not be seen as mutually exclusive. Braden Holloway is a great example of how you can combine the best of both to enhance the abilities of all swimmers, from those with potential to those competing at the very top.
If you want to learn more about how Athlee can help coaches to maximize their below-surface vision, as well as bettering training programmes for anyone from prospects to elite athletes, then please visit www.athlee.com to book a brief online demo.
NB: Braden Holloway’s participation in this interview is entirely independent, and he is not compensated by or affiliated with Athlee.
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