- Good morning, Trainiacs.
This swim, this swim, I think has it in for me.
You might not see me after this intro any more,
so if it does end up getting the better of me,
it's been nice, thanks for following.
All jokes aside, something that's kind of peculiar
about swimming is that it's not just that you do more of it,
you get better.
In fact, beginner triathletes, if you're not
working on the right things, you can actually
do damage to your swim progress
because you will associate difficulty
and panic and feeling short of breath with swimming,
which then just kind of compounds itself.
So today, I'm gonna go through the most common mistakes
that beginner triathletes are making
when it comes to their swim training
and how you should properly be getting into it.
That said, I don't know if I recommend
doing stuff like what I'm doing today.
It's like a 4600 meter swim,
with a good chunk of it being hard.
(energetic music)
That was no joke.
4550 yards in an hour 20, averaging a 130 per 100 yard pace.
Those have actually become quite enjoyable.
Coach Gerry asked me, "How's it going?"
I'm like, "Ugh, mentally, it's getting pretty tough."
And he said, "You've been doing these on your own
for about (sighs) nine months.
Go get yourself a training partner."
I got myself the best training partner.
This guy.
Best training partner.
- That survived.
(laughs)
He didn't die on you.
- All right, Trainiacs.
(groans) After that big swim, you know that spot
in between the shoulder blades?
It's just right back there?
Right in here?
It gets tight.
I roll it out and I hang it out.
All right, so I wanna come in here
so that I can, I can be a bit of a hands talker
and I can kinda demonstrate some of these issues
with the seven things that I think
beginner triathletes make mistakes on
when they start swimming.
And the first one is that, they just go and start swimming.
They think that it's like cycling or running,
where the more you cycle, the more you run,
the faster you get, the better you get,
the more comfortable you get.
It's not necessarily like that in swimming,
because it's so technique-based.
Go to any masters' club and take a look down the lanes
and you'll see very, very fit people in the slower lanes,
and fairly unfit people in the faster lanes.
And that just goes to show that it's not about fitness
and grinding out hard efforts and getting super ripped
and strong, it's so much more about technique
than anything like that.
So the first thing that you need to do
is develop comfort in the water
before you really even think about swimming,
and you can do that by doing drills,
like sink downs, you can do that by doing drills like
having your hands on the edge of the pool
and slowly getting your feet up and kicking.
You can do that by just getting comfortable
in the water, and we've got an entire free download
that has 18 drills that take you from
absolute no swimming to being able to swim
27 kilometers in the open water.
37 kilometers in the open water.
Go to triathlontaren.com/swimdrillprogram.
I think like, 7000 people have gone through that by now.
Next is that beginner triathletes don't use pool toys.
These are thinks like snorkels, bands, pull, kick boards.
These things are essential tools
because in a lot of cases, when they're used properly,
I'll get to that in a bit, they are tools
that can isolate certain aspects of the stroke
so that we can develop certain abilities.
So, a snorkel, a band, and a pull,
it can allow us to not have to worry about
keeping our legs at the surface of the water.
And all we need to focus on is kind of staying level
with the surface of the water
and having a really nice swim catch.
Now, the second issue to that,
and the third most common issue
that triathletes have when they start swimming,
is that they don't use all these toys properly.
Now for example, I see a lot of triathletes
that are struggling with being a little bit too wiggly
in the water.
Like, it's very common that triathletes
don't have the body awareness to stay
nice and stiff in the water, and shoot down the water
like a log.
They are wiggly, so they kinda go across the water
fairly slowly, they sink a little bit like a pool noodle.
Well, the pool noodle doesn't sink.
But you wanna be tight like a log.
Even a 3000 pound log can be pushed across the surface
of the water very quickly.
Thing is, when you use a pull boy
and just a pull boy, it's kind of giving you
another fulcrum in the middle of your body
that makes you even more wiggly.
So, we have all these swimmers that are using pull boys
as a crutch, but it's just reinforcing that wiggly body.
Quite often, you wanna pair a pull boy with a band
and a snorkel and turn your entire body into just, boom.
A really nice log going across the surface of the water
as straight as you can.
Fourth issue that I see is not getting into open water.
In the pool, you got a nice black line to look at.
You got all these big, juicy lane ropes
that take all the waves out of the water.
You don't have people kicking in your face.
You can actually see your hands.
Get into open water, all of that goes away.
So remember how uncomfortable you felt
the first time you went into the pool?
It's gonna feel basically exactly the same way
when you get into open water.
It's a completely foreign environment.
So you wanna get into open water
and develop comfort with it, so you don't panic
when you get into that race.
Do it as least five or six times,
and think about how comfortable you can be with things like,
triathlontaren.com/swimdrillprogram, how comfortable
you developed in the pool, translate that into
comfort in open water, and the swim in the race
can be like, (snaps) easiest part of it.
Fifth thing related to that is not wearing
or getting a wet suit wet
before your first race of the year.
If you aren't yet in open water
and you are going to a race where you have to
be in a wet suit, at very least,
if you can't get that wet suit on you
and swim a few times in open water before that race,
take that wet suit and put it in the shower
with cool, room temperature kind of water
so that it can, kind of, loosen up again.
And then when you get to that race,
you're not (pants).
Because when these wet suits are dried out
over the winter, or they're brand new,
they're really very tight and they need to get wet
to loosen up.
So get them wet, let them dry out, get them wet,
let them dry out, and you're gonna have more room
and it's going to be less constrictive
and you're not gonna have that panic response
when you get to the race.
Sixth thing related to that is,
even if you can't get in open water,
I would definitely recommend wearing your wet suit
or a swim skin, or whatever it is,
before the race in the pool.
Doing it four, fives times, as long as you wash it out
in the showers really good after,
that chlorine is not going to damage the wet suit.
It's going to be great for you
because you're going to feel comfortable
in that body position with the extra buoyancy
from a wet suit, or the added tightness from a swim skin.
Over the past few weeks, I've been wearing my swim skin
quite a bit in preparation for Half Ironman Puerto Rico,
so that I know where I have to put Body Glide,
where I have to cinch things up,
where I need a little bit of extra room here or there
so that I don't get bunching in certain areas.
But it feels nice by the time I get into that water.
It's like, "I've done this a half a dozen times,
and everything is routine."
And the seventh and final thing that I noticed
that beginner triathletes do is
they think when they get to that race, they're like,
"All right, I've been hearing about
the human washing machine, and I gotta get used to this
human washing machine and get in it."
There's really no reason for it.
I'm gonna tell you a little bit of math.
At Ironman Kona, the course basically goes up,
out a little bit, and back.
Basically, about as straight out and back as you can get.
And the start line is immensely wide.
Just, insanely wide.
And people think that they need to take ...
(clanging)
that they need to take a direct line down the buoys
if they want to do well and take the race seriously.
Well, over here are the people that are like,
"Well, they're not taking it very seriously."
Well, do some math.
You go across, you go across, and you do the math,
how much longer do you think it is
if you started way out here, where it's less congested?
There are much fewer people, less of that
human washing machine.
It's something like two feet longer.
I guarantee that just by going like this,
you're gonna end up going two feet longer.
And essentially, it kinda nullifies all of that.
You can swim your race, you can stay out of that
human washing machine.
So go way off to the side in a race.
Or let everyone swim out in front of you and then go in.
Even though it only takes about seven to 10 seconds
to let that main chop group go out in front of you,
I guarantee you're gonna gain that seven to 10 seconds back
by being able to race your race, not freaking out,
not being knocked around with goggles getting kicked off
your face, people punching you.
And when you're new to the sport,
all of those things can slow you down by two, three,
10 minutes, maybe more.
So just take the 10 seconds to let everyone go
and go for a swim.
That's it.
So I'm realizing that I didn't need all that arm space
to go through that, 'cause I didn't really demonstrate
as many things as I thought I would.
But, whatever.
A little change of scenery.
Now, as I say, if you aren't yet comfortable in open water,
in the pool whatsoever, if you can't yet swim
400 meters or yards continuously without feeling
out of breath at the end, and without feeling
like you need to take a break at all in the middle,
being completely controlled through that 400,
you need to develop comfort in the water first.
And you can do that
by going to triathlontaren.com/swimdrillprogram.
Put in your email address, totally free.
The entire drill series that I used to go from
barely being able to get across the pool,
being that person that wasn't confident in open water,
to being able to complete a 27 and another 37 kilometer
open water marathon swim.
Now, if you guys would just stop interrupting the videos.
They're antsy, they've been cooped up inside all winter.
All right, go check it out.
Later, Trainiacs.