How the heck do you swim faster?
2010 was my first year in triathlon, and my first time swimming. Had to learn to swim freestyle from scratch. I did the IM Louisville swim in the high 1:40's. My goal was simply not to drown, so I'm fine with that time.
I was hoping to get faster this year, but so far, it just ain't happen'. I feel like my form is pretty good; I've asked for evaluations from several of the lifeguards at the pool, and other swimmers that are way faster than me. They've offered some suggestions but no one has seen any glaring problems with my form (granted, these are just other swimmers, not coaches). And I don't really have an endurance problem. I'm just slow.
Are there any light bulb or "aha!" moments that anyone has had with regard to form, stroke, etc. that's resulted in a noticable improvement? I just feel like I must be doing something wrong, I don't understand how all the overweight 60 year old women at my pool can all be so much faster than me.
Jason
Comments
I highly recommend private lessons from a qualified coach who will do a thorough stroke analysis. This should include video of you swimming from multiple angles above and below water. Some may disagree but I am a strong believer in swimming with a masters team. I am pushed so much harder with the group than I would push myself.
That said, and I know this is EN heresy, but sometimes technique is not the limiting factor -- training time is. How often do you swim, and for how long? Are you just doing straight swims or interval sets? If you are doing interval sets, are you pushing hard or just cruising? Ultimately, if you want to swim fast, you have got to swim fast.
Finally, those 60 year-olds may have been swimming competively since they were 10.
Can you explain this a little more? Having a hard time visualizing what you mean.
You want your body as close to horizontal in the water as possible to minimize the frontal surface area that you present to the water. If you swim with your legs dropping below your torso, it increases drag. If you swim "through a tube" with your head, shoulders, hips and legs all at the same level, you minimize drag. Joe Friel's Triathlete's Training Bible has a pretty good illustration of this difference.
One technique that some coaches teach to create the proper body position is to press down on the water with your chest. If the chest goes down, the legs come up. While swimming freestyle, push your chest and lungs toward the bottom of the pool.
Don't overlook the theory that if you want to swim fast you need to swim fast. Technique is key but swimming and swimming hard makes you faster.
That is about 6 inches I wasn't pushing. So I felt like I was swimming faster by my turnover rate but really wasn't going any where.
My AHhh haa.....
In Total Immersion they call it Pressing the Buoy. You can try looking that up.
That is so true Chris. I'll see these people come to masters who have a swimming background but haven't been in the water for years - all body types. They smoke me every time. More time in the water will get you there also but it's hard to juggle with the biking and running.
I do very little swimming - maybe 3k/week and nothing in the OS... I hvae picked a few tricks along the way...but in reality, I think I just relax more...
So, if you can get lesson + master's team, you will have someone(s) watching you swim a lot. Balance is key, but you have to find you what is slowly YOU down. For me, I have a funny dead spot in my right arm stroke. It took quite a while for it to be identified.
And yes, to just swimming -- and swimming long and swimming fast. And clocking lots of open water hours, because it is weird out there and easy to have something fall apart there that is quite fine in the pool.
Swimming is a funny sport, you will do workout after workout and never feel like you are improving. Then you will have one workout and viola you feel much faster. The only way to get to these AH-haa moments is to put the work in and with PROPER technique. If you are swimming without a coach's critique then you are learning to swim the wrong way. And you will get very proficient at swimming the wrong way. RnP don't push swimming very much because it is such a small percentage of the race. But if you want to improve, it takes a lot of pool time. Last year i was swimming twice a week with about a total of 7000 yards/week. Since December I have been swimming 3 times per week and about 10,000-12,000 yards/week. I can honestly tell you that the additional work has paid off, with a half ironman swim improvement of 3 minutes. But that is with good technique (i have been swimming since I was a kid). Would I have been better off using that time to work on my bike power? Probably. But once I have the improved techniques and the faster swim habits and the improved feel for the water, I won't loose it. I can work on improving my bike power this next OS!
IOW- Get a good coach, spend more time in the pool doing the RIGHT work, be patient.
+1 on Masters. Bonus if the Masters has a great coach like mine. I swam in a lap pool for the first time in Jan 2010. Masters pushes me to see what I'm capable of. When you push yourself you can also 'expirement' with small changes in your technique/form to see how you can be more effieint in the water. Datapoint of one, but it's worked well for me....I swam my last HIM 1.2 miles as sub 30 minutes.
Common issues I see from new swimmers:
1. Runners especially, tend to have tight ankles. Your toes should be pointing at the wall, not at the bottom of the pool. Toes pointing down is the equilavent of throwing up a sail on the bike. Kills momentum. Some people can actually kick with their toes pointed down and GO BACKWARDS!
2. Kicking from the knees: Your propulsion is being driven from your lower leg. Sometimes referred to as the runners kick. Your legs should be basically straight with only a slight bend, ie not locked out. Your kicking from the hips. Think a pair of swissors. Not running underwater.
3. Poor body rotation, you should be rotating from the side when you swim 45 degree angle to 45 degree angle (ish). This is the propose of side balance and triple switch drills. Its puts the emphasis on body rotation. This also allows you to get long in the water = more speed boat and less tugboat.
4. Leaving the tube. Think of the swimming as entering a tube. You need to stay long, alot of swimmers have their breathing stroke poorly times. In order to get their breath, they drop their elbow on the non breath side and flair out their leg (tripod) to stall momentum in order to get their breath.
5. Head Position. You want your head in a neutral position and only your eyes roll forward to see. If the water level is hitting your fore head, your hips will drop causing huge drag.
6. Not swimming enough. Swimming twice a week you can only get so fast. Swimmers are fast because at some point in their life they swim a ton of yardage. 30K+ a week for years.
Feel free to throw up a video for people to review...
Excellent tips from everyone, especially Hayes. My notes:
Get quality swim instruction, 1:1 is best, with underwater video.
Swim fast to swim fast. Tweak the workouts, or write your own, so that you're whatever combination of interval length and rest so that you're swimming as fast as you can for a distance the length of which you can maintain your stroke. For example, last Friday Barry Plaga (EN athlete and good friend) did:
15 x 150m, as 100 very hard, 50 easy, then rest about 10-15secs. Barry went 5" behind me and tried to catch me, I tried to stay away. If I had done a "normal" swimming set, of 100's, 200's, etc, I would have probably swam them all at about 1:28-30/100m pace. But because we gave ourselves plenty of rest (50 easy as active cool down + ~10secs on the wall between 150's), and did the 5" head start thing, I racked up 1500m at 1:20-22/100m pace, with a couple 1:18-19's in there. More importantly, I'm getting into muscle failure and strokes start to fall apart about 15m from the wall = just about perfect. I then get the volume in with the warmup (about 800-900m), a quick pull set after that main set, and we are always moving. We're never on the wall for longer than about 30", the time it takes to figure out the next set and go. This is how "real" swimmers do it, very little wasted time.
I was a distance swimmer back in the day and looking back on how I trained, I wish I had done more stuff like this. Rather than 5 x 500 on 5:30, holding 5:20's and getting 10secs rest, and racking up 2500 at 1:06 pace, I wish I had done more sets like 20 x 150 as 100 hard, 50 easy, and racked up 2k at :57-58. I'm sure I would have been much faster.
The net is that assuming your technique is about as dialed in as it's gonna get, swimming faster is about putting more power to the water. The best, most sport specific way to train your body to put more power to the water is to swim as fast as you can with the best form you can, then giving yourself enough rest so you can do that over and over again.
I am also completely self-taught in the swim department. I got into the pool for the first time as a "lap swimmer" in January 2010. The only instruction came from reading the total immersion book and watching the DVD. On my very best swim days I am mediocre in the speed department (28:00 is my PB in an oly). I also believe I have reached the point where further improvement is impossible without intervention.
The takeaways I have from this thread are (1) real coaching is probably going to help, (2) swim hard to swim fast. I think there is probably something unspoken, which is that if you have a self-taught stroke (as I do) and it is flawed (which is likely), then swimming a ton is going to reinforce the bad habit so it is even harder to change later on -- the evil underside to the golf analogy.
The tricky part is to actually implement any of this advice when (a) you don't like to swim and (b) the admin cost of swimming keeps you out of the pool and (c) the ROI on the other triathlon disciplines is still really high. Perhaps this will be my pre-OS focus this year.
The swim sets I've written are EXACTLY the swim workouts that real swimmers do...though I've probably given everyone too much rest :-) Totally fine to drop the length of the intervals and give yourself more rest so you can swim faster, with the best form you can sustain for the length of the interval. IOW, 25's, 50's, or 100's, all day long, getting your volume in from swimming easy between repeats.