[background music] Heather: Triathlons come in
all shapes and sizes from sprint distance through to ironman. Whatever distance you're training for,
it is easy to think of ourselves as endurance diesel engines that don't need to sprint or
go fast even when the gun goes off, right? Mark: No. Not necessarily. We're here today
to explain why being able to sprint in the water is important, and hopefully help you to improve
your ability to do that. Also, hopefully see some improvements in your performance too.
Heather: Let's address the main point, why do you actually want to be able to sprint,
because when you think about it, all swimming races in triathlon are going to be anything
from 15 minutes up to 2 hours depending on the distance you're doing and your swim
ability. It's the start that we want to focus on. Now, whether you like it or not, you're going to
have adrenaline, you're going to be feeling nervous, and you'll probably go out stronger
than your average pace, whether you intend to or not. It's good to have
the ability to be able to feel uncomfortable and know what it feels like to swim faster.
Also, you might want to get yourself out of trouble and away from the masses. That's when
a strong sprint start can come in really handy. Mark: Now, if you've watched any of our other
videos on GTN, this first point may seem a little counter-intuitive, because we're often actually
advising you keep your leg kick to a minimum, specifically for triathlon. The main reason being,
that we have the bike and the run legs still to come after the swim. Therefore,
it makes sense to save some energy in the legs for those latter parts of the race.
However, when it comes to sprinting, our leg kick is really important, and mainly because we
can move our legs far quicker than we can move our arms. Therefore, we can get a lot of acceleration
very quickly from our leg kick. Also, our legs have massive muscles, and therefore
we can generate a lot of power very quickly from them. How to get a more effective kick? Firstly,
you want to focus on kicking from the hips rather than from the knees. A trap so many triathletes
fall into creating a lot of drag and reducing the power of the kick. This doesn't mean you
can't have a subtle bend in the knee, but refrain from fully bending and kicking from the knee.
Also, it's important to have good flexibility in your ankles so you can finish the kick and
propel yourself forwards. If you're someone that struggles with this,
a small amount of kicking with fins can help to stretch and improve this. Obviously, some focus
kicking within your swims will help, but there are some fun and simple drills you can include too,
such as pushing off the wall in the streamlined position with your hands out in front and kicking
hard until you need to take a breath. Swim easy back to the wall and repeat
three to four times, or try some vertical kicking for 30 to 60 seconds in the deep end of the pool,
really focusing on loose ankles and pointing your toes. You can use fins for this
if you like and progress to kicking harder and trying to get your shoulders out of the
water too. Heather:
Relaxation is actually important when it comes to sprinting. This might sound
counter-intuitive, especially as we're focusing on the start of a swim race,
where you're going to have that added adrenaline, your heart rate is naturally going to be higher.
That's why it becomes so important. You want to know what you're doing and feel confident with it,
so you can put all of that energy you do have into going forwards and preferably fast.
It goes hand-in-hand with breathing. You want to try to reduce the amount of breaths you're
taking so you've got less rotation, less things to worry about. There's also going to be a lot
of splash around from the others, so you don't want to be taking in any water with that. If you
can take fewer breaths, keep your head down and channel all that energy into going forwards and
fast before you settle into your stroke, and then you can go back to your normal breathing pattern.
A great way to work on this in the pool would be to do 6 lots of 25 meters. Push off the wall
and go as hard as you can for 10 to 15 meters without taking a breath, keeping your head down,
and then relax and swim easy to the end of the pool. Have enough rest until your breathing is
back under control, and repeat it six times. Mark:
Like the leg kick, we also need to increase our arm turnover or cadence if we really
want to sprint. If you need some convincing, just take a look at the Olympic swimmers when
they're sprinting on TV, but this is easier said than done. If you got used to your
current cadence or your current arm turnover, it can be really hard to change this. In fact,
just connecting our arms from our leg kick and that rhythm is incredibly difficult.
A drill that I often like to do is 10 to 15 meters hard off the wall with a really quick arm rate,
whilst barely kicking the legs. You can use a pool buoy to help keep your legs afloat if you like to.
This just helps to keep your arms working by themselves and not relying on the kicking rhythm.
Water polo is also a good drill for improving arm rate, essentially full stroke front crawl,
but with your head up looking straight ahead. Because your head is up,
you'll find that you need to catch quickly to make sure your legs don't sink too much.
Finally, the straight arm drill. It isn't the prettiest and it's certainly not the technique
that we're striving for, but it does allow you to spin your arms and get used to that feeling
of this quicker cadence. Heather:
With the increased stroke rate and the higher speed you're naturally going to find- you'll
feel a little bit higher in the water. You can add this a step further by helping to get your hips
a bit higher by simply lowering your head ever so slightly. If you think about it, you're not going
to be needing to lift your head to sight as often. You're also not going to be breathing as much at
the start of a race when you're sprinting. You can concentrate on keeping our head a little bit
lower, making yourself more efficient there. Mark has also touched on or talked about the
stroke rate and increasing stroke rate. With that you've got to increase all aspects of your stroke,
and that includes the catch. Obviously, the catch is an essential part of the stroke
and one that can't be missed. It does mean, though, you don't have time for the pause,
and it's quite hard to speed up your catch. A good drill to help with this is a single
arm because you're not going to have the natural propulsion of the other arm. As soon as you get
to that recovery phase, you're going to be losing your propulsion. You can exaggerate
this by using a pool buoy, and it'll really help you to just speed up that single arm and also get
that catch efficient, but also much faster. Mark: Finally, there are some toys we can
actually include into our swimming to help improve our sprinting, one of which is
fins. We've talked about using fins to aid our swimming to make things easier for us and also
to help improve our ankle flexibility. They do also increase the resistance during the kick,
by increasing the surface area of our feet. They don't need to be massive diving fins,
they can just be these short, stubby fins like this. You can do little sets like half
a length off the wall kicking hard followed by half a length easily repeat through something
like six to eight times. Then you've got a pretty hard workout, increased resistance
with the kick whilst having a bit of fun. Heather: We understand that sprinting plays
a very small part of your triathlon swim, but it's going to help with the rest of your stroke,
and also just spice up your training, if nothing more. I'd suggest giving these a go,
and let us know how you get on in the comments section below. If you've enjoyed it give us a
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