A note from Badger Parent Advocate, Michael Conaton:

There is much written today about sports nutrition and optimizing performance. To be honest I can’t keep it all straight. I always wished someone would have given us a menu of good foods to serve a swimmer during the season and at meets. It’s hard enough planning (and cooking!) a weekly menu for the whole family, but to also make sure it’s healthy and adequate for your swimmer makes it even harder.

This week’s article attached is from Dr. Rob Silverman entitled “Performance is about fuel, longevity is about recovery”. Dr. Silverman is an accomplished nutritionist and chiropractor practicing in Westchester. The article does a great job outlining the proper food groups and nutritionals for different occasions like practices and meets, but also for intervals during the day. It has some great suggestions for actual foods at certain meals. You’ll also see some mention of injury treatment as this was an outline for a presentation Dr. Silverman delivered in a more comprehensive lecture.

The USA Swimming website also dedicates an entire section to nutrition. It includes many great suggestions for healthy meals and snacks and explains the attributes of the nutritionals. Please see the USA website link for the section:
And this brand new article with more great meal suggestions:

For what it’s worth, I have included below some meals that have worked for us. Fortunately the ingredients for the most part are consistent with Dr. Silverman’s suggestions! But personally I think you can also drive yourself crazy trying too hard to do it too perfectly. At the end of the day, sometimes we were just trying to get calories into the kids who were training so hard and trying to hold weight. Often they would be too tired or their stomachs would be too upset following a hard workout to eat a proper, large meal. This is not unusual and another reason why, as Dr. Silverman’s article suggests, multiple meals throughout the day are a good idea.

Also like Dr. Silverman, we were fanatical about hydration. (We tried to be good at the simple stuff). These kids cannot drink enough water in my opinion. It’s the easiest way to influence performance at practice and at meets! The kids don’t realize how much they perspire in the water and inside the humid natatoriums. They have to stay hydrated. Hydration does everything from promote recovery by encouraging the flushing of lactic acid build up, to keeping tendons more supple and flexible. Multi vitamins to promote general health were easy too…keeping a bottle on the dinner table made it convenient and an easy reminder.

Remember self-selection…it was middle of high school or so when the boys asked about protein supplements. We never brought it up. It started with a bottle of Boost after each workout (I believe the practice passed down from one of Badger’s National Team members back in the day). Consuming decent doses of protein after a workout was discovered by the experts to aid and enhance recovery and became all the craze ~5? years ago. Today USA Swimming and college programs actually offer chocolate milk for example to its swimmers after practice or on trips and training camps as a recovery aid after workouts.

Protein and electrolyte regimens are becoming more and more common. I am probably very naïve when it comes to most of this stuff. We always took a very conservative and cautious approach to these supplements and only considered them when the boys were older (~16) for what that’s worth. Rightly or wrongly, we believed their natural physical maturity had to happen first or at the same rate. What do I know but it just seems that too much muscle mass on an immature bone structure for example, can’t be a good thing. Also be careful about what kids can find on their own on the internet with your credit card!

We are familiar with Metagenix, Isagenix, P2Life and Muscle Milk products. Creatine is a synthetic protein that supposedly builds muscle mass. I would encourage you to discuss this product and others with your doctors. Creatine is very hard on your kidneys I have read (yet another reason for hydration). I am not a doctor or a nutritionist and can’t endorse the use of any of these products. I only offer our anecdotal experience for your information. (Unfortunately I also found out that USA Swimming can’t endorse any of these products either due to the unlikely chance that a certain batch is contaminated).

Having said all this, these are kids too. They (and we parents) also may like to eat some stuff that may not be the best for us. During meets we tried to be more vigilant for sure, with low fat, no fried, easy digestion top of mind. But you know, sometimes a delicious In-N-Out Burger just hits the spot! Especially in celebration of a great night of swimming at a meet. The point is there is a mental aspect to some of this too. If it makes them happy to have a hamburger one night during a meet and they’re going to eat a good high caloric meal…maybe it’s ok…especially if you know you have a long night of digestion ahead (and nothing else is open or convenient and you have to get them to bed – like I said, you can’t go too crazy). As they get older your kids will also be more and more mindful of what they know they should and shouldn’t be eating, which takes the pressure off of parents eventually.

One final observation…Breakfast became a new found asset for us. It’s an easy way to get ahead in the day and get some good calories and lots of protein in the diet. We evolved into bigger and bigger meals as they got older, eventually even before school with bacon and cartons of eggs. Saturday morning breakfast after practice was a big deal as well.

So following are some suggested meals for what it’s worth…bon appetite!

In General:
Water, Water, Water; Chocolate milk; Boost; Vitamins;
Dinners:
Spinach, rigatoni, chicken; Pesto tortellini w pepperoni; Salmon, asparagus and biscuits; Chicken parm and pasta; Any protein and veggie stir fry; Tacos/burritos; lettuce tacos; Shake n Bake chicken, fish; Stuffed peppers; Steak, rice
Saturday/mornings:
Breakfast burritos; Turkey Bacon and eggs; leftover rice, eggs & bacon skillet mix; Waffles; French toast; Tater tots, bacon & eggs skillet mix.
Snacks:
Low sugar cereal; oatmeal; yogurt; bananas; English muffin peanut butter banana; soft pretzels; bagels.
Restaurants at meets:
Subway; Soup and salad bars; Non spicy tex mex (rice, beans chicken); IHOP; pasta.
Hotel room:
Water; Gatorade; Bananas; mini-Bagels; Cereal and milk (if refrigerator); Trail mix; Power bars; Cliff bars; Nutrigrain bars; ….Oreos.

Keep those topic ideas rolling in… mikecbadger@gmail.com

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Michael Conaton, Badger Swim Club Inc. and Badger Swimming Inc. accept no liability for the content of this article, or for the consequences of any actions taken on the basis of the information provided.

A note from Badger Parent Advocate, Michael Conaton:

Last article was about physical maturation.  It stands to reason that early developers may be able to swim faster when they’re relatively bigger and stronger.  And we also argued that the comprehensive Badger approach of learning, loving and excelling was a practical way of accommodating both the early and later maturer.  We concluded with the observation that kids mature and matriculate through the Badger program at different rates and ages, by design.

Moving up through the groups at Badger and ultimately learning how to excel often happens in conjunction with what I’ll call your swimmers’ “self-selection” and enhanced dedication to swimming.  The article attached this week was on the USA Swimming website a few years ago.  It is in the form of Q&A and, right on point, addresses questions related to climbing the ranks within a swimming program.  Questions like:

“What type of commitment is necessary for a higher level of swimming?”
“Are morning workouts necessary?”
“Is my child sacrificing too much?”
“What does it mean to say the swimmer controls 80% of her training?”

Interestingly, the article is entitled “Training for Older Swimmers”. USA Swimming wrote this for “Senior Swimmers (13 & Over)”. Remember per last week’s missive, depending on physical and mental maturity this could be 13, 12…even younger? It’s not unusual or necessarily inappropriate for Kip and John to want some girls to train more at an earlier age, for example, as we all should know that generally females may mature physically earlier than males.

I still remember the day when our kids came home and said Kip wanted them to move up to John’s group.  They weren’t sure if this was good or bad!   What it means is the coaches believe your swimmer is physically ready to train more and push their bodies to excel (more on that later).

The article attached suggests that it helps when the kids are mature enough to step up their focus and dedicate themselves to harder and harder training…mental maturity, if you will. Because the sport of swimming is especially tough, the kids have to be self-motivated at a certain point.   For what it’s worth, our kids played and enjoyed different sports growing up which I believe actually contributed to their physical development and enabled them the perspective to be able to self-select ultimately into the sport that THEY wanted to pursue.  This happened at different ages for our kids. As parents, we were all about trying to get them to follow through with commitment but some days, you know life was just too short. We definitely had our moments of tears and dragging heels before some practices when they were a lot younger.  It tests your parenting skills for sure. They definitely missed a couple practices in the early days! What’s wrong with a mental health day every once and while to keep everyone fresh?

Comes a time though when the kids have to commit and want to do it themselves. I’m not saying not to push as that is our job to get them to the pool, but don’t be so hard on yourself parents…you can only push so much.

There’s no question there are the Phelps and Ledeckys of the world that train long and hard and swim fast at a young age and go on to become Olympians. If a kid self-selects that early and can physically and mentally train productively, all the power to them.   But it’s OK too if it ends up being a longer process…both the physical maturity and the self-selection.  I know it’s a recurring theme of mine, but I think it helps the kids (and parents!) to always think long term and trust in your coaches who know when it is time for your swimmer to be moved on and pushed a little harder. See article here.

Thanks for your input. mikecbadger@gmail.com.

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Michael Conaton, Badger Swim Club Inc. and Badger Swimming Inc. accept no liability for the content of this article, or for the consequences of any actions taken on the basis of the information provided.

Maturation (Part One)

This week’s article found a long time ago addresses the concept of maturation.  What hopefully is easy for you and your swimmer to understand is that kids grow and mature physically over different periods of time.   The article suggests that “early maturers” may not even have perfect stroke or technique but are able to out-perform given their early physical development.  The challenge parents may have with these kids is trying to keep their accomplishments in perspective early on while keeping their kids interest later when their peers catch up.  The challenge with the “later maturers” is helping them keep a longer term perspective while looking for that incremental improvement along the way, and working on stroke and technique in the meantime.

By the way, I never believed physical stature told the whole story anyway.  We can all think of examples of great athletes who may not have been as physically gifted as the next.  When I was growing up the world record holder in the 400 IM, arguably one of the toughest events in swimming, was held by Ricardo Prado who stood ~5″5′.

The second part of the article addresses strategies to deal with the early and late maturers.  The first point to highlight is “to keep in mind that early success does not predict later success”.  Studies show that early champions are not always the same kids later in life.  What is more alarming in the studies is that many kids stop sports all together after enjoying early success, due in part to the feeling of inadequacy or disappointment after their peers catch up.

Learn, Love, Excel…the Badger approach is meant to accommodate both the early and later maturer.  It is also meant to be a comprehensive approach to nurturing a swimmer’s physical abilities while cultivating more and more interest and, finally, intense dedication to swimming…over time. As your kids progress in the coaches’ estimations, they are handed up from group to group. Obviously this very often coincides with age and related physical development. Learning the right techniques obviously helps all swimmers as they grow.  Learning to love swimming and learning how to train will help both early and late maturers to get through their respective challenges mentioned above.  Once your coach believes your swimmer is mature enough mentally and physically to handle the tougher practices, they move on through the programs and begin to excel.  This last step comes at different times for different kids.  I will talk about this in Part 2 next time.

Some commentary for what it’s worth – It’s really hard and potentially very unfair to yourself and your family to put too much emphasis on comparing your kids to others, especially at younger ages. Good news/bad news – Ours is a sport that is measured by times, instantly recorded on Meet Mobile and in the US Swimming and metro logs. The good news is we can measure and track improvement in black and white. Our kids are not subject to playing time dictated by a subjective coach of a team sport. The bad news is (or better put – the perspective to keep in mind), is that comparing times is not always apples to apples. Obviously times are tracked by age group, but we all know even within a tight two year age group that kids all grow at different times. This is a huge contributing factor to speed, especially at the age group level.

Please see article attached

Keep your emails and questions coming…mikecbadger@gmail.com. Thanks!

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Michael Conaton, Badger Swim Club Inc. and Badger Swimming Inc. accept no liability for the content of this article, or for the consequences of any actions taken on the basis of the information provided.