Jodie Cowie Blog: Road To Rio begins!

With less than six months to go until Olympic qualification it’s been an intense month! We started September working with Biz Price to choreograph two new duet routines for us to take to Rio.

The choreography is really interesting and it’s definitely pushed us to reach outside our comfort zones. It’s really exciting to have routines that are choreographed to our strengths, and having finished them in early September it gives us lots of time to perfect them!

We’ve recently been on a training camp in Majorca with Spanish Olympian and silver medallist Andrea Fuentes. It is an honour to work with her because she has so much experience to share with us. The aim of the camp was to work in lots of detail to perfect the new choreography and make sure we were swimming it in the same way.

Throughout the camp we were starting each day with yoga. It was important to wake up our bodies for the tough day ahead, as well as work on areas such as isolating different body parts which would help us swim our routine better. Each yoga session finished with a few minutes of meditation to help improve focus, self belief and motivation.

We all know it’s going to be a tough Road to Rio but are all willing to fight hard for it!

The first few days we were really breaking down the routine and making sure each movement and angle was exactly the same. The routines are still very new so it’s important that we don’t let ourselves do the movements smaller/easier than they were choreographed because then they lose the effect.

Andrea was really good at bringing out the emotion in the movements to help bring out the themes in the routines.

• Click here to read Jodie’s full Road to Rio post on her blog.