Maximize Your Swim Session
The swim is for the majority of athletes the toughest of the three triathlon sports. If you spend hours at the pool and swim several thousand meters a week and your not seeing improvement in your times it’s not a reflection of fitness but more of the quality in your workout sessions.
Every workout whether it is swimming, cycling, running should have a specific goal and mission. If you just “go” swim or “go” run without a goal, which at times is great to blow off steam and stress, your missing out on potential greatness.
Swimming is a difficult sport. When are trying to move our bodies through a medium of liquid (water) which is very dense and difficult to move through. Our body placement is critical in achieving and efficient and effective swim strong. It does not happen over night. It can however happen quicker if you put quality and goals back into your sessions instead of focusing on quantity.
Here are my top 5 tips for maximizing your swim sessions
Structure If you do not warm up or cool down for your swim workout your missing out on the potential for improvement. Not only does warming up help prepare our bodies for the main set it teaches us effort and pace control. The warm up should start very easy and build in intensity before your main set. The warm up should be roughly 20-45% of your workout.
The warm up should include drill work, kicking, breathing work, and stroke technique, all the basic fundamentals. Without working on and keeping the fundamentals of our swim stroke strong we can not perform at our best and we increase our risk of injury. You can also think about incorporating short intervals into the latter half of your warm up to mimic some of the efforts of your main set. Remember the warm up is preparing you to do work.
Think of professional sports, specifically football. The players come onto the field, everyone in their different groups and they go through their fundamentals. A quarterback might go through his throwing mechanics and foot work and play calls and timing. He starts at a slow speed and gradually increases that effort up to game day effort. They work on drills and fundamentals as well as technique. This is how we should think about doing our warmup. Not just swimming but any sport we choose to take part in.
The main set is your work set. This is where you should be practicing speed work, endurance, open water sighting technique, pace changes, tempo work, sprints, race day effort, etc.. Most of the heavy lifting is done here.
The main set should be 50-75% of your total workout time. The remaining time would be used to cool down and stretch.
If you are running short on time, I encourage athletes to shorten their main set instead of skipping the warmup and cool down. Bypassing these components over time is how the athlete increases their risk for injury.
Quality and Variety Having quality and variety in your session is a key component to success. If you find that your warmup, main set and cool down paces are all the same you may want to change some things up. And maybe your just getting started and this is your first day, first week or first month in the pool. If it is then focusing on being comfortable and learning the basics of the swim stroke is more beneficial. If you’ve been swimming for several months or years and you do not have variety in your swim sessions and pace changes, then I would highly encourage you to change things up.
By swimming your warmup, main set and cool down sections at different intensity you are teaching your body pace control and effort. You are creating muscles memory so when race day comes you know what warm up effort is compared to race effort or main set effort. It allows your body to adjust and transform in a safe manner to do the harder work and your more likely to hold pace better over time. You are also going to burn less energy by starting easier and learning pace control and effort.
Variety is the next big component. If you are swimming freestyle for your entire swim sessions your missing out on improving your aerobic an anaerobic capacity and your increasing your risk of injury. Yes we swim freestyle in our races and freestyle is the majority of our swim sessions but it does not have to be. By incorporating and learning different strokes like backstroke, breaststroke and if your ambitious enough, butterfly, you will start to see some dramatic changes in speed, energy and efficiency.
Incorporate backstroke into your sessions as recovery. Say your doing 8x50’s and the Odds are sprint effort and the Evens are recovery. Instead of swimming freestyle for recovery swim backstroke. It allows your muscles a break and you get to stretch and lengthen those muscles back out. Also the backstroke catch and pull phases of the stroke are very similar to freestyle so becoming good at backstroke can help your freestyle. Not to mention you can breathe the entire time. This is great for racing as well. If you find yourself panicked or in trouble having a secondary stroke to rely on is crucial and backstroke is a great stroke to help bring your heart rate down and breathing under control.
Learning to swim a 100IM. This means swimming one lap of each stroke. Butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and finally freestyle. If your not up for butterfly yet you can swim freestyle or backstroke. This is a great way to improve your efficiency, lung capacity, coordination, endurance and overall strength. Plus incorporating the variety of swim strokes gives your mind a mental break from non stop freestyle and your more likely to be happier in your swim sets.
Flip Turns I hear many arguments for why I should or should not do a flip turn. I don’t have a wall on race day, it’s cheating, it’s too difficult to learn. Here’s the deal. Learning how to do a flip turn has several advantages to doing the open flip turn. Is there anything wrong with doing an open flip turn? Absolutely not. Are you missing out on something? Yes!
When you incorporate flip turns into your swimming you do several things. You learn timing in your stroke and your breathing which is very beneficial from an endurance and speed stand point. You also learn how to carry speed into the wall and keep it throughout the turn and after you push off the wall. You get a better idea of how to get streamlined and glide in the water. Make your body compact and streamline is a huge advantage in swimming.
You also build endurance and lung capacity. In an open flip turn believe it or not you do get a small break. It might be 2-3 secs but add that up over a set of 10x100’s or a 1x500 and that is a lot of rest on the wall overall. When you do the flip turn you don’t have the option to rest when you hit the wall or breathe. You must haven timed your stroke and your breath correctly so you can perform the flip under water, push off and glide and then take your breathe. That requires a lot of concentration and skill but in doing so you gain valuable endurance, timing, lung capacity and proprioception. This is the ability to know where and what your body is doing in space at any given time. Basically it increases your timing and coordination. All things that are needed for swimming successful.
Bi Lateral Breathing This is extremely helpful in creating body symmetry, core strength and balance. What if the wind is blowing on the lake from left to right or the sun is coming up on the side you breathe on. If you can only breath to one side that is going to be a rough day looking into the sun or waves hitting you in the face. Being able to breathe on the opposite side can be a huge advantage on race day. Maybe the person or persons your drafting or sighting off of are on the right side of your body. If you can only breathe to the left that is not going to work well. Small things like this can make huge impacts on race day!
Open Water Technique I would venture to say 95% of the swim racing we do for triathlon takes place in some body of open water like a river, lake or ocean. However if you are new to triathlon I would highly suggest finding a short sprint or super sprint distance that incorporate a pool swim. This is a great break in option for new athletes that are fearful or not yet proficient in swimming.
That being said I come across a number of athletes that struggle with improving their times. Apart from the first 4 tips mentioned above I was surprised at the high percentage of athletes that did not practice open water technique like sighting and drafting. If you can’t swim straight you can potentially add hundreds of yards to your swim distance and that is a quick way to increase your time and not set that pr. Drafting is another technique that is hardly practiced by age group athletes. Drafting unlike the bike is completely legal. The ability to draft off several people in a race and swim a faster time without the same energy you would if you swam along is a huge advantage but yet few people practice it or even think about it.
You can easily practice open water swim techniques in the pool. If your swimming with a group of friends you can practice drafting in your lanes swimming one behind the other or side by side, lining ones shoulder up with the swimmers hips in front or to the side of you. Not to mention swimming in the same lane you get to practice what it feels like swimming in close proximity to others, just like race day.
Rarely do I see swimmers practicing open water sighting and breathing during that main set race efforts like 1x500’s are 3x800’s etc.. It takes coordination to sight while holding race effort. If it is practiced and done correctly it can save you time, energy and speed but if it is not practiced and done incorrectly on race day it can leave you feeling exhausted, panicked and out of breathe. You will spend more energy than you need and that will come back to haunt you on the bike and especially the run.
The takeaway is practice the little things. They will be difficult at first, just like most things but if you focus on the long term goals of getting faster, stronger and more efficient as well as spending less time at the pool the incorporating these items into your swim sessions can have massive payoffs!
For more information on coaching and swim analysis please email us at info@enduranceondemand.com
