- Are you using your pool buoy wrong?
(upbeat instrumental music)
Probably the most controversial.
(upbeat instrumental music)
This is not the face of a man who enjoys it.
(upbeat instrumental music)
Morning, trainiacs.
You are using your pool buoy wrong.
I know this for a fact because I used my pool buoy wrong,
and I use my pool buoy the way most people use a pool buoy,
and that tends to be a lot,
so unless you have a swim coach
that is like so anti-pool toy,
odds are, you're probably using your pool buoy wrong.
It's a fact.
(upbeat instrumental music)
So this little devil is probably the most controversial
pieces of pool toy equipment that everyone has
in their pool bag and on the pool deck,
off level, folks.
People love them, I love them.
A lot of folks that I swam with in masters
had to have these surgically removed over these years.
It's a problem.
The issue with it, as far as age group swimmers go,
is that we tend not to come from a swimming background,
so we have very sinky legs.
We want to put a pool buoy in there to fix that,
but the pool buoy is a crutch.
It doesn't teach us how to have good swimming mechanics,
so what it does is it just promotes our sinky legs.
It actually encourages us to have more sinky legs,
and then we get out into a race,
we have super sinky legs because we've been
relying on this to keep our legs up
to the surface of the water,
but that's not to say that it's an awful piece of equipment.
We've all got them in our bags here.
The thing is, you've got to know how to use them properly.
So the one issue that you've got with this is,
let's take that little band of death off,
we'll get to that,
is that it completely ignores the kick
and the kick is how you balance out your body,
it's how you get your legs up close
to the surface of the water,
hey Chris,
and while I say you shouldn't be kicking hard,
you certainly need to kick enough
that you get your legs up to the surface of the water
and you've got a balanced swim position.
Now if you want to have some flotation
so that you're not just dragging an anchor behind you,
a better way to do that is with
my trusted floaty pants.
With floaty pants, you still get that flotation
from the neoprene, at the position
that your pool buoy would be in,
but you're not completely ignoring your kick.
Now the second issue with the pool buoy
is that it can break the chain
of the front of your body going all the way to the toes,
functioning just side to side like a log
floating down a river.
Putting on a pool buoy,
it can basically just allow your legs
to snake side to side while your body is churning
and trying to pull it all.
One way to fix that that's very easy
that we use a ton is to get a snorkel
so that you don't have to lift your head up to breathe,
which a lot of people will do with their upper body,
leaving their lower body stationary,
and a band to tie your ankles together.
Yeah, it's awful, but it works,
and what that does is that it creates one long chain,
right from your head all the way to your toes,
and then you have to focus on just going side to side,
not wiggling at all, not lifting your head,
and turning your arms over.
It allows you to focus on a proper catch.
This is then giving you an advantage, not a disadvantage,
because you can isolate
a certain part of your stroke properly.
And then overall, this just in general promotes sinky legs.
It doesn't teach us how to become a better swimmer
by raising our legs up to the surface of the water
and reducing drag naturally.
Lately I've been talking about a drill that I've been doing,
again, with a snorkel, totally different
than the isolation one that I just talked about.
It's called pressing the buoy.
It's where you put the snorkel on
and then you press your chest deep into the water,
creating a see saw effect so that as you press your chest
close into the water, your legs come up,
and those are a lot better ways to use a pool buoy
than how most people do it when,
just the swim gets too hard or they don't feel like kicking,
or they get tired.
That is using a pool buoy as a crutch,
not a training tool.
Now I mention this all the time,
but I'm going to mention it to anyone who's missed it.
If you want a full swim drill program series
that allowed me to go from struggling
to swim the length of a pool,
I kid you not, I could barely do it,
to being able to complete a 37 kilometer
open water marathon swim and a 27 kilometer
open water marathon swim,
go to triathlontaren.com/swimdrillprogram.
It's a free 15 drill swim series,
and these are the drills that allowed me to not drown.
Now I've got to go swim.
I'm so late.
The things I do for you.
(upbeat instrumental music)
This is not the face of a man who enjoys max 50s
on two minutes.