During the season swimming can be described as bash and crash, where we churn through the laps, keen to stay on the feet of those ahead of us and do whatever we can to not get dropped. While this can work us harder it typically comes at the expense of technique.
This was something I fell victim to during the season, where my lack of fitness meant I was doing everything in my power to scrap and fight just to stay in touch with those I was swimming with. It was only when I had a brief pause for a moment and did a session on my own where I refocused on technique that things started to change. From that point on every session continued to improve whereas before that my form was stagnant at best. And more important, I actually started to enjoy swimming and going to the pool.
When I coach athletes during a swim technique session the first thing I talk about is that I want people to build a mental blueprint for what swimming should look like. I always want people to be able to see the swim stroke so clearly in their mind that they are able to stand in front of me and demonstrate dry land the perfect swim stroke.
For swimming I like to break the stroke up into the following areas and this is what I hope to see in their demonstration-
To start with all I did was work on a longer stroke. I was constantly working on ways to hold the glide hand out in front of me for longer before I started to work underwater. As soon as I started to do some stroke counts and work on only adding the underwater work when I had finished the benefits of the previous stroke my swimming improved. I worked on improving my golf/swolf scores where my aim was to swim as quickly as I could without working hard.
Then I worked on body position, swimming proud and not burying my head into the water. Again this gives me almost automatic feedback as my perception of speed improved with this subtle change. I also was lucky enough to swim next to Neil who is super consistent, so whenever I implemented a change, I could get immediate feedback on whether it had benefit as I would pull away from him if it did.
I would love to say I was able to work on my kick to optimise the gains from it, but in most cases the best I can do is make sure it doesn’t slow me down, but what does work is enhancing my rotation. I only learnt to breath on one side of my body (courtesy of only taking up swimming when I was 24!) and as a result I rotate to my breath side but fail to rotate on the non- breath side. Not only does this make me a less efficient swimmer but I have ended up with countless shoulder problems because the left arm swings wide and presses down on the water rather than slides into it.
But again, as soon as I work on bilateral rotation, I can feel the gains as again I would notice I could pull away from Neil. Yes, there are drills you can work on but for me I like to simply use cues and feel. If I feel it, I can fix it. So, I work hard to understand where my body parts are when I swim and try to manipulate them as I swim. Sure, drills work great for swimmers, but we are triathletes who firstly struggle to execute the drill well and then struggle to adapt the drill focus into their stroke. I see them all the time doing something like a zipper drill with high elbows and then as soon as they go to a normal stroke, they go straight back to swinging the arms around or pulling the elbow back and around.
So, as we move it not winter, consider changing your mindset about swimming. For me this is the time to adopt more of a technique mindset. There is plenty of time for hard swimming but if we can work on changing patterns hopefully you will see some big gains coming your way in the future.