Triathlon Swimming   •   May, 2018

35 years or older, no sports background or possibly with a running one, decides to try out his/her first triathlon after hearing about the Lisbon Challenge, the Oeiras Triathlon or the IronMan 70.3 Cascais .

Does anything here sound familiar? Maybe yes or maybe no but believe me when I say it’s perfectly normal. You know what else is also perfectly normal and actually quite common?

Trying to swim one lap and be gasping for air that you need to stop everytime you reach the wall!

WHY?

Could it be that you’re so out of shape?

Well, like in any sport, the better the shape you’re in, the easier it gets. However, reality is, that in most cases, this extreme fatigue where you finish a lap totally gasping for air has nothing to do with being out of shape.

It’s actually quite easy to understand that the difficulty felt has got nothing to do lack of endurance or strength. Just head out to the pool a couple times, do a few lap repetitions and if the problem was indeed physical condition, you would see big improvements in a very short time. So, that would be applying the same logic as you would when preparing the bike or running segment of that Triathlon you are trying out.

Just take a quick look at the running preparation. If you can only run for 5min straight right now, and then you have to walk to get yourself ready to run a couple minutes more, you quickly understand that the way to get to longer runs is… go running more often. It’s intuitive, it makes sense and you quickly find out that after a few days of repeating this, those 5min from the 1st day quickly become 15min. A few more days like this and you’re running an hour straight without any stops. So, the problem was mainly a conditioning one and can be solved quite “easily” with training and repetition.

If so, then why doesn’t this work with swimming? Want a simple and straightforward answer?

BALANCE

(the video below helps to sum up the idea)

THE TRICK IS BALANCE

As you can watch in the video, the whole trick is in how you position yourself (your body) in the water. The better you balance yourself, the less resistance you’ll get when you try to move, meaning when you try to swim. The best way to explain this is to use the beach tennis racket example.

Picture yourself at the beach, in the water, holding a beach tennis racket in your hand. If you turn the racket’s face towards the sky or the ground, you can move the racket around underwater with little or no effort, almost like if it’s a blade in th water. Now rotate the racket by 90º so that it’s perpendicular to the ground and try to move it around quickly underwater. It is difficult and requires a lot more effort than when it was horizontal, right?

The physics is the same for your body underwater. If the whole are is very large, you suffer more resistance to movement and thus end up having to apply more energy and effort to move.

TECHNIQUE VS PHYSICAL CONDITIONING

Unlike what happened with running, where through simple and steady repetition and training, you were able to improve your overall physical condition and run 1 hour straight, that will not be enough for swimming. It’s not enough because water is much denser than air. The “mistakes” or technical inefficiencies you may have while swimming have a much greater impact on your success than when running.

Being balanced in the water is the number 1 trick to improving swimming performance.

If you truly acknowledge and understand that everything you do in the water has an impact “N” times larger than when you run or ride a bike, you will quickly realize that the majority of your time in the pool should be spent improving your technique, rather than improving your physique.

In swimming, given the unique characteristics of this medium, the best use of your time, and thus the one that gives you better returns, is on technique.

Swimming is ultimately a technical sport.