(water splashing)
- Mornin' Traniacs!
It's just a casual little 2,000 meter swim.
Something that came up last week during the Traniac
Mini-Camp for the two first-year triathletes
came into town and we worked on their swim-bike-run,
was specifically in the swim,
where I was reminded how first-year new triathletes
have such a hard time breathing in the water.
So today, I'm gonna give you three steps to fix that.
We're gonna get outta here, 'cuz it's kinda loud.
But I'll show you the drills to do.
(upbeat dance music)
Alright, so, Traniacs, there is a three-step process
that any swimmer can use, any triathlete,
any noob can use to develop confidence in the water.
Get rid of that feeling where you're like
(gasping for air)
"I'm sinking, I'm sinking!"
Three steps, and six drills.
Two drills with each step, three steps.
Even my Canadian math makes that work out.
Step number one, you wanna develop an allergic reaction
to not blowing out air when your face is in the water.
You wanna train your body, such that, every time your face
goes in the water, the second it goes in the water,
you're blowing out bubbles until
the very second that you stop.
You end up holding your breath whatsoever,
you're gonna build up carbon dioxide.
If you don't blow out bubbles hard enough,
you're gonna end up building up carbon dioxide.
You're not actually short of breath,
you've got too much carbon dioxide.
So, to fix that, what we do, is we do two drills.
The first is very simple, you go on the edge of the pool,
and you put your hands on the edge of the pool.
Stand in a shallow end where everything's controlled,
and you can be confident.
Put your face in the water and immediately start
blowing bubbles as hard as you can.
Do this a whole bunch of times.
Do this five times, 10 times, at the start of a workout,
so that you reinforce that habit.
Once you're able to do that comfortably, you wanna do
that and build that into not feeling panicked
when you start going under the water.
So what we do is the same sort of thing,
but we go in the deep end
and we do what are called sink-downs.
That's the second drill.
That's treading a little bit of water, and then
all-of-a-sudden we just take a breath, and start
blowing it out, and because we are losing the buoyancy
in our lungs, we're gonna sink down a fair bit,
and you just keep blowing out as long as you're
in the water, and you develop comfort with
having your body completely submerged in the water.
Between those two things, you are going to gradually
develop basically the reflex that
as soon as your face is in the water,
(blowing bubbles out through lips)
you blow out.
The second thing we wanna learn how to do is
to disobey gravity in the pool.
While 92 percent of our body weight is displaced
when we go into water, there is still that
8 percent that wants to sink a little bit in the pool.
As we sink a little bit, we start panicking,
we start breathing a little bit heavier,
we start kicking a little bit harder,
all using up more oxygen,
building up more carbon dioxide,
making it harder for us to swim.
So what we wanna do is we want to learn
how to float to cross the pool,
and these two drills will help you do that.
Number one, go back to the edge of the pool, and you
just wanna kick your back leg up just slightly.
Just learn how to kick those feet off the bottom
of the pool, keep blowing out,
and learn how to press your chest deep into the water,
and pull your butt up close to the surface
without kicking very hard.
What you do then next is you practice
the Superman float across the pool.
That's where you turn your back to the wall,
you kick off, and you just stretch out like a pencil,
and slide across the water, and what you do is you stay
nice and calm, and get rid of that reflex to like,
"I've gotta get out!"
Because once you start tensing up,
once you start hyperventilating,
you build up carbon dioxide,
that tension makes you sink even more,
and it makes it harder for you to float to cross
the bottom of the pool effortlessly.
Combine number one, where you're not building up
carbon dioxide, with number two,
where you're floating across the surface of the pool
really easily, and all-of-a-sudden, you can just lie there.
You're set! You ain't goin' anywhere!
You aren't sinking down,
you aren't building up carbon dioxide,
you aren't feeling short of breath.
Then we just have to get the third thing in our mind,
and that is to slow the hell down.
Waaaaaaaaaay down.
And particularly, this means slowing down your kick.
Your legs are the biggest muscles in your body,
and what a lot of people do is they kick
really, really hard, really hard,
'cuz they wanna get across the pool as quickly as they can
so they can get that full breath, so it can be over.
But what's gonna happen is they're gonna kick across
the pool, they're gonna build up a whole bunch of
carbon dioxide by using up all the oxygen that they can,
and they're also going to be very, very tense,
and what's happening is as they kick harder,
they're using up more oxygen,
and they're building up tension and sinking even more,
and that is against what we want to do,
just moving across the pool in a controlled manner.
If you look at any Olympic swimmer who's doing just
casual, say, 1:10 per hundred yard efforts,
they look so smooth, and it barely looks like they're
working very hard because for them
they are not working very hard,
and that's what we want to do is not work very hard.
So the two drills that you need to do for that is again,
go back to the pool edge, and instead of kicking your feet
up off the bottom and just leaving them there,
and using your butt and your core to hold your feet at the
pool surface, you wanna just kick slightly.
Kick your feet off the bottom of the pool,
and then just gradually, with a tiny little flutter-kick,
as light as you can possibly make it,
bring your feet up to the surface of the water.
Then the final thing that we do is to incorporate
all of this, we take that light little flutter-kick,
we go into a pool lane, we put on some fins,
and as lightly as we possibly can, extend one arm,
blow bubbles, kick lightly with our feet,
and just grab a little bit of oxygen.
So blow bubbles, get rid of all that carbon dioxide,
kick very lightly, float across the pool easily,
grab a breath.
And if you've done all of this, by this point,
you will not be out of breath,
you'll be floating easily across the pool,
you will be kicking very lightly,
not using up energy and oxygen in your legs,
and all-of-a-sudden, swimming becomes
very comfortable, very easy.
So those drills are a small spattering, basically the start
of a swim-drill series that we put together at
triathlontaren.com/swimdrillprogram that by now,
I think 6,000 people have gone through, and we get an e-mail
every-other day from people messaging us saying that it has
completely changed their swimming.
They're moving easier, they aren't working nearly as hard,
but, they're enjoying swimming more, and going faster.
So if you're actually serious about taking up triathlon,
and you wanna go through that entire
swim-drill-series program, it's free.
You just go put in your email address and get it.
Go to triathlontaren.com/swimdrillprogram.
If you aren't into that and you aren't yet subscribed,
hit the subscribe button below, and if you are subscribed,
take a breath of fresh air... pool water air.
All right! Later, Trainiacs!