- Morning trainiacs, busy in the main tank today.
It is a time trialey kind of day for me.
I can taste the lactic acid already.
(upbeat music)
Let's do a little stretch cord workout
before the pain train leaves the station.
All right now the triceps are good and messed up,
we have a thousand meter timed trial
and a 100 meter time trial.
Just subscribe to the Tower 26 Coaching Program,
that's how we start it off pain!
(upbeat dance music)
So that there was 4000 meters on the nose.
That'd be 4500 yards.
Right around there, thousand meter time trial,
1638 long course meters,
100 meter time trial
128 long course meters.
That was awful.
Gerry Rodrigues you are a mean, mean man.
Tip of the day, if you got yourself a workout
that you gotta write down, get yourself a kickboard,
wet one side of it, press this up against it,
stand it up on the pool deck, bam,
you got yourself a makeshift whiteboard.
And this is basically the only thing
that non orange kickboards are good for.
So if you've been around for a while
you might be wondering hey Taren are you still swimming
with the group that you normally swim with?
Well...
Temporarily, no!
You see what I was finding was happening was
the group got so quick, the average hundred meter effort
that 60% of the group could do was somewhere around
I think a 120, a 125.
I just did that max hundred meter time trial in 128.
So when the lane is that different,
it was virtually impossible for me to keep up
so I was spending all of the workout thrashing
with bad form, not really getting any better.
And what I was seeing, in previous years is that
the fast swimmers would get faster.
The average swimmers really wouldn't get much faster
from year to year, we would go from, in my case,
I would start the year with a 400 meter timed trial
of around 615, improve that to like 605, 608.
Not really a big improvement.
The next year, I would do the same thing.
So It's not like I was really becoming a better swimmer
year to year, I was really just swimming more.
And then in getting to know Gerry Rodrigues of Tower 26,
listening to quite a few of his podcasts lately,
there's a lot of things that are like ooh,
I'm definitely not doing that.
And I'm doing workouts here that are designed
for people who are already good swimmers,
not triathletes who are trying to become a good swimmer.
So one of the things in particular that Gerry Rodrigues
goes against the grain of swimming for triathletes with
is early vertical form.
So that's the concept of get out,
immediately pop your elbow up,
get your elbow way out in front of you,
get that forearm pointed down, and then push back.
And he actually does this demonstration on YouTube,
I will link it right there and in the description below,
about how his arms, being a former swimmer
are so much more flexible
than the average triathlete's arms.
So instead of early vertical form working for triathletes,
it's basically impossible.
So instead of recommending that people go out
and then pop their elbow up, he says go out, down,
don't worry so much about that early vertical form,
but worry more about having your fingertips
point at the bottom of the pool,
somewhere a little bit closer to your head,
and then accelerate back.
And then kicking for example,
I've talked about this a whole heck of a lot.
Gerry says that working on your kick
is fine if you're Michael Phelps.
It's find if you're doing a 50 meter or 100
or a 200 meter race like a swimmer.
But triathletes, we have to do a 20, 30,
130, two hour swim and be fresh enough
for the bike and the run after.
And to kick and get just such a tiny little amount
of additional propulsion and have to put in
hours and hours and hours and tens of thousands of meters
to even get half good at kicking,
it's low return on investment of your time.
So he recommends that we kick, like I say,
an appropriate amount and no more.
And his workouts are designed to,
I did a ton of kicking there, not to make your kick better,
but rather to have your kick facilitate
a nice long body line, a taut body he calls it.
So...
We kick but with a different intent than swim workouts.
And then things like breathing, so Gerry explains
whether you should breathe every three strokes
or every two strokes in this sort of context.
If your stroke rate is 60 breaths a minute,
and you are breathing every three strokes,
you're only breathing 20 times every minute.
How often do you breathe
when you're walking or jogging or cycling?
Somewhere around 60 to 80.
And elite swimmers that breathe every three strokes,
they have such high stroke rate up until the 90s
and hundreds, that they are breathing 30, 40,
50 times a minute, maybe more.
The sprinters that are only breathing
once every 50 meters or if that,
they're sprinting, they're doing a 50 meter race,
not a 20, 30, hour and 20 minute race.
So in our case we need more oxygen,
so we need to breathe every second stroke,
but we also need to be able to bilateral breathe
so we have a choice of which side to breathe on.
Just explains this stuff very well.
You see this?
There's not a lot of snow left.
I'm gonna have an excuse to use the Saris Rack.
(deep breathing) Riding bicycles.
So there you go, those are a bunch of the reasons
why I've committed to joining the Tower 26 Swim Program
for at least three months and
hopefully we see some improvements.
If you aren't yet, subscribe, hit that subscribe button
below to see if I do make improvements and fall along with
what Tower 26's benefits are.
If you are subscribed, and you like Tower 26,
hit the like button, check out their podcast,
it is good, very good.
Also check out the Triathlon Taren Podcast.
It just so happens to be the most reviewed
triathlon podcast in the world,
just saying Jer, Just saying.