When I first got into Triathlon it was after about 20 years of never being in the pool
I was actually quite afraid of the water a few years later I went from struggling to
swim just a 25-yard length to actually completing a nine-hour 17-Mile 27 kilometer Marathon
swim across a lake I really believe that everyone can do that where it started getting a little
bit easier for me was when I learned how to breathe so today I'm going to give you the
three best tips that I received that helped me get a lot more comfortable in the water
and get control my breath while I was freestyle swimming the first and this is probably the
biggest baddest and best tip that I can possibly give is to slow yourself down in the water
part of the problem is that all we see on TV is footage of Michael Phelps and pro triathletes
and they are swimming like mad now most age group triathletes aren't fit enough, we aren't
built the same way that those pro athletes are we don't have the Decades of swimming
experience behind us to expect ourselves to swim at that super high intensity level for
much longer than the length of the pool so the best advice that I can give is to slow
yourself down in the water and you're probably actually going to go a little bit faster because
you're not thrashing you're going to be able to catch and feel the water little bit better
and specifically over a triathlon distance which might last anywhere between 10 minutes
and an hour and a half or two hours if you're doing and IronMan you need to conserve a lot
of energy and the slower you go and the more controlled you are and you control your heart
rate the better you're going to be able to do so when you're first starting out make
sure that you slow yourself the way way down until you get control your breath when you
get comfortable in the water and then once you get past that first phase of just learning
how to be comfortable in the water and then you can worry about adding a little bit of
intensity here and there and slowly building up your lung capacity the second tip is to
slow down actually it's not that crazy to think about forgetting about your altogether
it's only anywhere between 5% and 15% of your thrust that actually comes from the kitchen
so you can spend thousands and thousands meters kicking and let's say you get 50% better in
your kick you might only get a couple percent faster beyond that your legs are the biggest
muscles in your body so if you're kicking really hard you're going to be burning up
a ton of oxygen and that's oxygen that you're going to have to take in you're going to bring
it a lot heavier A good rule of thumb for Triathlon freestyle technique is that your
kick shouldn't be for thrust you should focus more on using your kick for balancing your
body keeping your body streamlined and getting a little bit of body rotation as long as you
can get that out of your kick you don't have to kick my charger finally make sure you spend
a fair bit of time teaching yourself how to float in the water water is actually 784 times
more dense than air and triathletes we're all very guilty of being aerodynamic weenies
on the bike so we should really worry about being hydrodynamic that's actually a word
being more hydrodynamic in the water the big focus on being hydrodynamic in the water is
making sure that your legs pick up and they're not causing drag you can start solving that
issue by teaching yourself how to float so that your legs want to stay up towards the
surface of the water and then slowly adding a kick and slowly adding your stroke more
and more as you become more floaty that is a very nerdy thing that I just made up there
you have it slow yourself down conserve Oxygen by kicking a lot less and teach yourself how
to float those were the three biggest tips that I got that took me from being afraid
of the water and literally not able to swim in the pool to being able to swim across the
lake for 9 hours I believe that every single swimmer out there might now grow to love swimming
but you can certainly get yourself into a position to make it a lot more bearable these
three types are very good start as always have fun with Triathlon and kill your next
A-Race!