- All right, today we're going to be talking about sighting.
It's so often performed incorrectly and actually overlooked,
yet it's such an important skill for everyone to swim.
- Yeah, absolutely, so because of that,
Mark and I today are going to take you through
a very simple step-by-step process, so that you are able to
sight better in your next race.
(lo-fi music)
- Right, first thing's first, when we're discussing
sighting, we actually want to consider our alignment
in the water.
And by that, I literally mean how our buoyance is,
how we align from head, shoulders, hips, and feet.
- That's a song, isn't it?
- (laughs) Exactly.
When we're talking about striving
for a neutral buoyancy, and by that, literally our feet are
in line with our head.
What we're trying to stay away from is sinking legs,
which probably quite a few of you struggle with,
actually in the pool, but also something we need to consider
in the open water sighting.
- Yeah, and what Mark's effectively talking about here
is thinking of it as a seesaw action,
and if our head is out of the water too far
than that's actually knocked our legs further into the depth
and that can act as an actual break our anchor,
which is the last thing that we want to do
when we're trying to swim forwards as quick as we can.
So there's two ways that we can do that,
by having our head out of the water too long,
and that's because we're lifting our head too far,
so it's just up there, out of the way far too long,
and we're sighting too long on what we're trying to see
rather than just taking a quick glimpse.
- Yup.
So what we're actually really trying to strive for
is what I liked to call "crocodile eyes."
So literally, just bring our eyes out of the water,
leaving our mouth in the water where possible.
Obviously in choppers we've got behind us now,
it's not always that easy.
Sometimes your mouth does come out of the water,
you'll probably see in some of the clips now, but
we are always trying to strive for
as minimal movement of the head as we can
to disrupt the stroke as least as possible.
So to do this, all we want to try and think of doing is
when we're catching the front of the stroke,
we're applying pressure down on the water,
and this is a real natural opportunity to, as we press,
we lift our head ever so slightly out of the water.
So, just the eyes, if we can, some really minimal movement.
And then, as that hand catches a little bit more
and starts to pull into stroke,
there's opportunity then to just breathe to sight
as you normally would, so it's not an additional movement
within the stroke and then we're into the recovery phase.
- Yeah, and then as Mark talked about,
our recovery arm comes back over and,
just like you are in a regular swim stroke,
think about that as a trigger to knock our head back
into that neutral position that we want to be able to have
for resuming our regular swim stroke, so we can start
thinking about the next opportunity to sight.
- [Mark] Yeah, and how often you do sight
is entirely up to you.
Now, we normally recommend
somewhere around three, four, or five strokes
in between each of those sights.
But of course, you can breathe in between each of the sights
as you normally would, but we do want to make sure that
we're sighting enough to make sure
that we're staying on course.
We're trying to minimize how much we veer off course
and add unwanted mileage to that swim.
(upbeat music)
- Now, once we're into that race situation,
and we've managed to find ourselves some feet
and some of those hallowed bubbles to follow,
it's very easy for us to give ourselves a little
personal high five, "Yes, we've done it!
"That's my job done for this swim."
But do not forget
to keep that sighting going during the race,
because those feet that you're following may well not be
going in the right direction,
and you certainly don't want to start veering off
just as Mark was suggesting we need to avoid.
- Yeah, I've definitely been there and followed feet
that were going the wrong direction.
Equally, if you are swimming in a group,
you're at the back of that group,
if you're sighting, you might spot a gap opening out
within that group,
and perhaps you might feel like you could go with those
leaders within the group, and that's an option if you turn
net around that certain minute that you're behind
and get on to those feet in front,
and minimize adding any additional time to your swim.
As you go around the buoy, what I'd often recommend is
actually throwing in a few more sights
than you've had before.
This just makes sure that
you've locked on to that next buoy,
you know where you're going and then you get back into
your normal rhythm.
Equally, if you are on a nice straight,
and you're really confident in the direction you're going,
you can get away with sighting a little bit less.
Obviously, just getting into
a nice rhythm with your swimming.
- Now, don't forget that this is something that
can be practiced all year round,
outdoors or in the indoors when you're in the pool.
And in fact, if that is the case,
a drill that Mark and I both really like doing is
practicing head-out-of-water polo,
when you're in the pool, especially,
cause that's just a really good way of practicing
that different body position that sighting brings in.
- And I'd also add to that, I'd just throw in the occasional
random sight during the swim session.
It just breaks things up as well.
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- Yeah, and if you want to see a video that I did about
how to swim in a straight line, you can find that here.