Swim Coaching with

an Open Water Champion

She turns to Endless Pools for effective coaching work from home.

During the long months of Covid, many of us learned to work from home. That's true of swimming coach Marieke Blomme too. She created a separate room in her home for her Endless Pools® Elite model.

"When I started looking for solutions to give swimming lessons at home," she told us, "I looked at a lot of different companies and different brands with similar kind of pools, but there's basically nothing that comes close to your system."

She first learned about Endless Pools while watching swim instruction videos with Swim Smooth, the innovative coaching system. She saw that our exclusive swim current technology could open doors for her to coach at home with more convenience and faster results.

Swim Coaching from Home

Before assembling her Elite pool in her home, Coach Marieke had been "working in public pools around the city, but it's quite difficult. It's always a searching for some hours that work for clients, that work for you. It's always busy in pools here."

With her own Elite pool to train her clients, "there's nobody else disturbing the lesson. You have the whole area to yourself. You don't have to wait for anyone to get out of the way." (It also allowed her to train more rigorously for a world-record open water swim, but that's a story you can read here.)

Another big perk of Endless Pools training, she finds, is the control that she gains from having a current to adjust to each swimmer's pace. "You can choose the speeds for the swimmer. If you want them to swim slower or faster, you choose, and they have to adjust.

"A lot of lot of people do way too much, use too much power. By making them swim slower, you can work more easily on their technique."

Elite Training in the Elite Pool

Marieke chose our top-of-the-line Elite pool. It's the pool of choice for professional athletes and many NCAA swim programs. "I chose that one, first of all, because I thought if I want to invest in something, I'd better make sure that I have what works best."

The Elite has a top speed equivalent to a 56 second per 100-meter pace. Only the best swimmers can handle that pace for long! But pushing your limits is a critical part of lactate threshold testing, which many elite athletes use to improve their endurance performance.

As Marieke sees it, "If I want to do tests with people to see where the threshold is in swimming, I want to be able to go the [fastest] pace that anyone can go. Not a lot of people in Belgium do the lactate tests in swimming. So that's interesting work to be able to do at home. I can control the pace, so you have better results than when you'd get from a field test in a public pool."

More commonly, her swimmers just want to swim better, faster, and more efficiently. "Most of them come to get a better technique [and] some video analysis. Most of them are triathletes. I have some beginners and some kids. A little bit of a mix," which helps to keep the work interesting and fresh for her.

A Pool for All Levels

For her less experienced swimmers, Marieke relies on the grab bar that's attached to the front of the Endless Pools outlet grill.

"If you learn to swim when you're 40-plus and you had a bad experience, it sometimes really difficult to get past that fear. If I take them to the other [public] pool, they are constantly on the side of the pool, holding on, panicking. Well, with the bar in front, they feel a lot more comfortable to try things and to get their head underwater. To teach beginners, that's a really good tool.

"Also, the pool is not deep," she adds. Marieke's Elite pool has a 45-inch water depth. It's a popular customization option in lieu of our standard 42-inch water depth.

Besides working for a world-record swimmer like Marieke and her students, the Endless Pools Elite model also gets used by her husband. "To be honest, he doesn't like to swim," she admits. "He enjoys the fact that he can just swim half an hour and have a better, time-managed workout. You just change, get into the pool, and nobody's in your way." Sounds to us like swimming the way it's meant to be.