Coach Tidey on getting Stjepanovic peaking for Olympics

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  • Gold is the goal: That is the sole aim of Velimir Stjepanovic's training for the next two years.

    In the world of elite swimming, competitors build their training plans covering a four-year period as they target success at the Olympic Games – the pinnacle of sport. 

    Serbia’s Velimir Stjepanovic is the most successful Olympic swimmer born and raised in the UAE and his coach, Chris Tidey of Hamilton Aquatics, explains how the 20-year-old is gearing his training towards gold at the Rio 2016 Games.

    Stjepanovic, who made the 200m butterfly final in London 2012, is heading to the European Championships in Berlin next month – which is a stepping stone towards his ultimate goal. 

    Tidey spoke to Sport360° about Stjepanovic’s training regimen, his four-year plan, and what makes him such a promising prospect. 

    What makes Velimir special as an athlete and as a swimmer?

    At that level, it’s not actually physical, it’s mental skills. When you stand on a box in the Olympic final, some are a bit taller, shorter, more muscular, but generally speaking what sets people apart are their mental skills.

    And how do you help him become mentally tougher, do you do specific mental training?
    It’s something which we’ve worked on all the way through. Expecting him to swim faster at certain points, asking him to take challenges, and there’s also very specific mental training like visualisations. 

    Before the European Championships, would he be doing less work now, or more?
    Before a competition, it gets quite easier, it’s something we call a taper – the closer we get to a competition, the less we do. Which can go from the same number of sessions each week which he would do, right down to one session every day, instead of doing two sessions a day.

    What would a typical week of training for him look like, when he’s not tapering?
    A worst day for him would be to arrive at 5:20 in the morning. He’s usually one of the first people there. The next 40 minutes consist of loosening off, followed by a dry land session which would be 20 to 30 minutes led by Marko, his physio, and that would include core work, a lot of body weight exercises. He will then get in the pool for up to two-and-a-half hours, it could be longer. It could be an extremely intense 5,500 metres session or it could go up to 8,000 metres. He’s done some 10,000m sessions this year.

    And what would he do after to recover from a session like that?
    He would have a light snack, and make sure he’s hydrated. He’d then go straight to the gym after that. We’d never normally do two 10k sessions in a day and a gym session. He’s done a 10k session followed by a gym session – that’s not a problem at all. If he’s doing two sessions in a day, it would be maybe two 7,500m sessions then a gym session. He’d normally spend an hour and a half in the gym before he goes home. He’d have to eat correctly after that, rehydrating, resting. We then start again at 17:15. Within the year he has university on top of that. Now he gets a chance to relax and recover in between sessions. Four times a week he has to do something called a hyperbaric chamber. It aids recovery. You zip it all up and it inflates itself to 1.3 times atmospheric pressure. You’re breathing in a high concentration of oxygen and it aids recovery. The pressure forces the oxygen into the places that are normally harder to recover. And he has to get into that for about an hour and a half a week. So, sometimes he does do a swim, a gym, hyperbaric chamber, and then the evening swim as well.

    Does he get any days off?
    He has one day off a week, which are Saturdays. He only swims once on Friday, so effectively he has a day and a half off. 
    The most important thing is the recovery process, that’s what makes the training he does effective. His week is usually a double on Sunday, a double on Monday, a single on Tuesday, double on Wednesday, double on Thursday, single on Friday. Some sessions are longer but steadier, some are shorter but more intense. Without having the easier long sessions, the body will basically shut down. If he tells me he’s not feeling great, I adjust accordingly. 

    You mentioned eating correctly, do you advise him on that?
    I have in the past. He’s a sensible eater. He doesn’t eat junk. A big treat for him is after a main competition he’d go and eat a burger. He generally stops himself. Sometimes if we find he’s lost a lot of weight within a 24-hour period it might have to do with hydration. We also check he’s not getting too heavy. But generally speaking he’s in control of his own diet. Sometimes I give him beetroot juice closer to a competition, it helps with blood flow and it’s reported to be very good for your immune system. 

    What’s a typical diet of a swimmer like Velimir then?
    It’s a balanced diet. We encourage him to eat straight away after training – a piece of fruit. As long as it’s coming from a clean source, he has to be very careful of what supplements he takes. There are a few supplements he does use – we use PAS (Pro Athlete Supplementation) which are clean products. They supply him with hydration drinks, protein bars for after each session and we use something called Beta Alanine all the time and when we get closer to competition, we use Sodium Citrate. 

    How do you make sure he peaks at the right time?
    You put your most important competition on the calendar first. For swimming, that’s the Olympics. Then you fill it in with the other important meets, whether it’s the Commonwealth Games, the European Championships, the Worlds… you work out what’s important and it’s basically a four-year plan. Initially, our plan led into Velimir’s London 2012. He got into the final, as an 18-year-old, that was fantastic. We made the conscious choice at that point to train as hard as he possibly could but at the same time he had a back problem. But because of the mental skills he has, he shut out the pain but it resulted in him taking more time off after the Olympics than he needed to. But the year after the Olympics is steady one anyway. We’re in the second year after the Olympics at the moment and everything is back up. We’re putting in place skills now that he needs to give him the opportunity to win the Olympics.We’ll work a lot harder on his underwater kicking. Working on his timing, the power he can produce in the gym and the main thing we’ve worked on – we use a full-time physio for him and his sole aim is to make sure his back is strong enough to deal with the next two years. So he’s in a position now, Marko has done a fantastic job with him, where moving forward we can reliably say we can get him back up to the big volumes leading into Rio.

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