Sheila Taormina's new Book: Swim Speed Secrets for Triathletes. (Page 3)

The Portland Bridge swim?  Website says it's 11 miles!  Downstream mind you...

Island girl really wants to press "Like" but all I can think of is BRRRR! Still a little fresh out of the med tent from that ...

It is most appreciated to see two intelligent and erudite members carry on a discussion with civility, who have different philosophies about swimming and teaching swimming; and do each other the courtesy of showing much respect for the other.

Bravo!

I lived there.  There are many reasons I wouldn't do that, and the temperature is not one of them.  Awesome location if you didn't have to get into the water though

AdventureBear - 2012-04-27 10:34 AM

TriAya - 2012-04-27 11:11 AM

Again, I think this is a matter of opinion. I'm sorry, but I can't agree with a blanket statement that says people struggling to get past 2:00/100 (I'm assuming this is ballpark endurance pace, not all out?) have drag as their main issue. It's probably one of their issues, but whether it's the most important and needs to be addressed first, I couldn't say without seeing them swim.

I'll accept this challenge...show me the videos at that speed, most swimmers simply don't have the experience or time in the water to have developed good strokes/pulls or kicks. But invariably none of them have good balance. Improve that one thing and everythign else simply works better. THEN take the time to modify the stroke or kick. No swim problem gets fixed immediately and swimmers whose arms are simply slippping back creating no traction at all have a hard time doing anything to improve their swim...but improving traction and perfecting a high elbow catch are two different projects. The first suitable for newer swimmers, the latter suitable for more advanced.

If I had time I would get into the pool and take a video for you.  I have pretty good balance in the water.  It is the one thing I have going for me.  I don't need my kick to maintain that balance.  I am stuck on 2:00/100.  I am no faster with a buoy or in my wetsuit cause they have balance issue to correct. 

bzgl40 - 2012-04-27 9:05 PM

AdventureBear - 2012-04-27 10:34 AM

TriAya - 2012-04-27 11:11 AM

Again, I think this is a matter of opinion. I'm sorry, but I can't agree with a blanket statement that says people struggling to get past 2:00/100 (I'm assuming this is ballpark endurance pace, not all out?) have drag as their main issue. It's probably one of their issues, but whether it's the most important and needs to be addressed first, I couldn't say without seeing them swim.

I'll accept this challenge...show me the videos at that speed, most swimmers simply don't have the experience or time in the water to have developed good strokes/pulls or kicks. But invariably none of them have good balance. Improve that one thing and everythign else simply works better. THEN take the time to modify the stroke or kick. No swim problem gets fixed immediately and swimmers whose arms are simply slippping back creating no traction at all have a hard time doing anything to improve their swim...but improving traction and perfecting a high elbow catch are two different projects. The first suitable for newer swimmers, the latter suitable for more advanced.

If I had time I would get into the pool and take a video for you.  I have pretty good balance in the water.  It is the one thing I have going for me.  I don't need my kick to maintain that balance.  I am stuck on 2:00/100.  I am no faster with a buoy or in my wetsuit cause they have balance issue to correct. 

I'm pretty sure I'm there with you....I'm slower than 2:00/100 and my balance is good.  PB and wetsuit don't make me faster either. I think Adventurebear you have seen my videos.

I will take either of your suggestions for improvement any day. Question for you though. How would you go about not insulting your Instructor/Trainer when they point out something you need to work on but don't necessarily agree with what they are telling you to work on. Example, I just read that I should try and enter the water sooner which I think would help to get my arm at a lower angle sooner to help push the backend up, but my instructor is currently working for me to reach more before entering. I think just different styles but maybe not what works best for me. 

I received my copy of the book today (thanks ot a one month amazon prime we got free by buying a kindle fire) - and have only had time to read the first couple chapters.

I am a blank slate and have no idea how to assess one person's approach over another. I just know I swim poorly.

What I already like about the book is her approach. She is promising that in the next chapters, she will lay out a step by step method to improvement. She claims that many of the things that people try to focus on first will not be the biggest factor in their times. The 80/20 rule is the basic concept she applies. What factors are in those 20% are probably a source of debate between her and AdventureBear and others. That's the level at which I couldn't understand any of you yet.

But, for me, following ANY course of action that lays out step-by-step one issue at a time, is probably going to help. She makes a case, and she is not the first to say it, I do understand that - that there is a wealth of information about swimming, but we all try to tackle everything at once. This is more like a flowchart (my word) approach. I described it to my wife at dinner and she turned to our 8 year old and said "isn't that what your violin teacher is always telling you? Work on one thing at a time?"

Like I said - not new or earthshattering, but just what I need to start to wrap my brain around it. My nature is to try to understand every piece all at once, then turn on the machine. That hasn't been working for me at all.

I'll report on how this helps.

Kimberly, I took the trouble to look at your swim workouts for the year. I hope you don't mind me throwing these numbers out there. I do so in response to what appears to be you questioning why you have plateaued with your speed.

• January you swam 7 times, avg distance was 2308 yards
• February you swam 11 times, avg distance was 2400 yards
• March you swam 11 times, avg distance was 1995 yards
• April you swam 5 times, avg distance was 810 yards

Some obvious fixes - increase frequency of swims and increase yards. You started the year out doing several 3000+ yards workouts - that's good, but then it dropped off. February was a relatively good month for you. March was pretty consistent, too, but your average yardage dropped by 400 yards per session. Looks like you missed half your workouts in January and March; I know life gets in the way.

When we evaluate performance in my business, we look at 3 key performance indicators. I think that is readily translated in terms of physical performance, as well.

• Volume (frequency, consistency, and sheer numbers - swim lots, ride lots, etc)
• Skill (in this case, your form)
• Targeted effort (doing drills, intervals, tempo swims, etc.)

When all 3 of these things come together, we should expect good outcomes. If we aren't getting the outcomes we expect, it's helpful to review these 3 areas to see where we might improve our efforts. Let me throw these rhetorical questions out there, to illustrate my meaning:

• What good is a perfect form, if we don't build endurance and speed by putting in the volume?
• What good is volume, if our we lack a clear focus/target to how we swim those yards?
• What good is targeted effort, if we do too little of it?

There is no question that form is what gets you some slick speed. On the other hand, I know someone whose form makes me cringe; he learned to swim late in life, for triathlons, and he can bust out 1:30/100 in practice. He has powerful upper body and that more than compensates for what he lacks in form.  I'm not advocating for ignoring your form, I'm just pointing out that bringing power and endurance to your swim will benefit your speed.

I can't remember the name of the Olympic swimmer about whose form many commentators made snickering remarks. When asked how she would describe her form, she replied "Rapid."  Again, I'm not suggesting you discount the importance of form. But there is more than one path to speed.

But back to your dilemma. How long have you been plateaued at your current pace?

p.s. I noticed you were experiencing shoulder pain after one of your swims. Pushups might help with that; it is what was always prescribed for us back in my swimming days and seemed to do the trick. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, but it's a very common solution.

oh, I know why I am slow. At least one of the main reasons.  My point was to the fact it is not balance.

ETA: but I do appreciate the feed back and the time you took to check out my logs

I wasn't calling you slow! I was responding to your question about why you are stuck at your current pace. When the form is good, then that points to either volume or what you are doing with the volume. Maybe I should just have written that?

AdventureBear - 2012-04-27 7:57 PM

bzgl40 - 2012-04-27 8:49 PM

oh, I know why I am slow. At least one of the main reasons.  My point was to the fact it is not balance.

ETA: but I do appreciate the feed back and the time you took to check out my logs

But if you post a video we might actually be able to help you with real feedback! If your shoulder hurts swimming, there is probably a technique issue somewhere. I won't give up the "video challenge" without actually seeing a video. Prove me wrong.

Fred helped me with the shoulder issue.  I use to cross over on my swim so I went totally the other way trying to correct it and he suggested I might be going to wide.  And that turned out to be the issue.  Seriously no time for the swim thing though or I totally would post one but I am moving this weekend and that includes moving away from my lovely pool to a location with really no pool access.  So it's all DU's for me for a while.

If you're a serious student of your swim, get this one.

Ordered Sheila's book a few days ago after hearing about it here, got it today, and, because the swim is the thing I suck at the most but love the best, read it cover to cover.  Its a great book for anyone interested in increasing speed by improving their catch and pull.  If you're anything like me, you find most really intelligent swimming treatises almost too technical - you learn something, but aren't quite sure what to do with the information when you pull down the goggles tomorrow.  This one is great at informing you what to do and how it should feel when you drill or swim.  Money well spent.

The point of the book is speed, and the thesis is straightforward:  "[t]he pull is the vital factor and ...body position is not."  (p. 26)  The book is a broadside at the TI approach, so if you enjoy those typical, if by now tedious, exchanges, you'll find the obligatory hand grenades here.  E.g., referring to a swimmer who is a "student of the 'glide like a fish theory" for 10 years but had not become any faster, she says "the fact that he continued to work on something for more than a decade that resulted in no time reduction tells me that there is a need to help triathletes . . . see the real picture."  The real picture, in Sheila's view, is that the pull is "80% of swimming" and "body position" - used in the book for essentially everything else about the freestyle stroke, only 20%.  Sheila analogizes to the Pareto principle, which observes that in many human activities, 20% of the workers/tools/investments produce 80% of the positive results - here he point is that all the body position in the world will not make you fast unless you have a great catch and pull - perfectly horizontal and streamlined swimmers rotating their hips and all that (the 20%) will move slowly if they have a crappy dropped-elbow pull (thus missing the 80%).  Sound like anyone you've seen over there in that other lane . . . .?

Sheila is careful to explain that she is not saying to blow off body position and just tow your sagging body through the drink with a monster pull. She explains that although "ody position is definitely something that the top swimmers understand and try to perfect," the only reason their work on body position means anything is because these swimmers are tearing up the pool already with an incredible pull."  (p. 25) 

But swimmers dragging their sinking hips and legs won't find very much useful on those problems here - they are referred to a paragraph in a sidebar with assertions like "establishing the correct body position is easy, but learning to relax is sometimes not," and encouragement to "work on keeping your head neutral in the water rather than lifting it," to "spend some time simply getting to know the water" while doing dryland work and simple sculling to begin developing technique, flexibility, and strength for the pull.  Tips on exactly how to get flat in the water, somewhere near the surface, with your cyclist quads (which is certainly doable and something that folks like Sheila Taormina do perfectly) is something you'll have to find elsewhere. Just be aware that this is a book directed primarily at folks who are beyond those issues.  I'd love for Sheila to have spent just one chapter on her recommendations for getting triathletes who need it flatter in the water.

Brief but very good discussion of the kick - when and how to bend the leg, where to feel the water on your lower appendages, why your kick may move you nowhere or even backward - very nicely put.  There are some gems on hip rotation as well - why you do it, what it does and does not do for you, how much is just enough, and how and why not to overdo it.

But 80%-plus of the book is about the optimum catch and pull, and on that critical subject, its a slam dunk masterpiece: - what it is, why it makes you go forward faster, what it looks and feels like, timing it (like SwimSmooth et al., the thrust is that gliding is a dirty word - if you want to go fast at least), and the drills and exercises to use to develop the ability to execute it.  You'll definitely read things you can take to the pool that you've not already read 100 other places.  Sheila leaves out none of the details, and has a wonderfully clear writing style - and if your a visule learner, the extensive sequence photos and accompanying video set are just outstanding.  The only slight shortcoming is that, with the exception of the advice on dryland swim bench/tubing work, where a training progression is laid out in stepwise fashion, the book is long on tools, short on directions for assembly - you'll need some understanding of training programming to put the drills and coaching points into a training progression.  Probably not much of an issue for people who'd be interested in this book in the first place - a rotation of a couple or three of the half dozen odd recommended drills will easily plug and play into any normally designed workout. 

Worth noting is that Sheila encourages people that they CAN execute the high elbow/EVF technique if they develop the flexibility and strength to do it - and suggests exactly how to do that.  Good stuff, compared to some others who toss off EVF stuff too easily as physically impractical or injurious for most adult non-fish.  Sheila also creates realistic expectations - no promises of quick profound changes or "effortlessness," but instead, that someone rebuilding their catch may have to go a little slower initially, put technique first and resist the temptation to swim faster than they can hold the technique together, and expect to see improvement after several weeks or more of focused progressive work on "the vital 80%."

For swimmers (1) with good horizontal position, breathing mechanics, and a reasonable kick (pretty enough but slow, and we know who we are), (2) but stalled in terms of speed improvements due to dropped elbows, overgliding, etc. (we may know who we are - posting a video will tell you quickly), and (3) who want to get faster, this book is a clear path forward. 

If your major problems are earlier-stage issues (hips and legs dropping and dragging, crap kick, breathing problems, etc.), probably best to prioritize those issues first, but still spend some time and get started on pull development - as the book suggests.  Sheila makes a convincing case that there is no real reason to put off attention to the catch until some future time.

Bottom line:  this is a great add to any serious triathlete's stack of swimming material.  

Just managed to get through this book.  It will probably be helpful to intermediate-to-advanced swimmers who want to fine-tune their catch & pull, but doesn't offer much to beginners, IMHO.

Without discounting the importance of the pull in generating speed, I was hoping for a more comprehensive discussion that also dealt with integrating other aspects of technique, i.e., body position, balance, kicking, etc.  It's a little misleading that title of the book is Swim Speed Secrets, not Swim Speed Secret. 

Given the relatively narrow subject matter, it probably could have been dealt with in half of the 200 pages.

Certainly some good stuff on elbow position, catch & pull, but not the end-all swimming instruction book.   

It was kind of like reading a golf instruction book that only discusses keeping your left arm straight and nothing else.

Just my $0.02. 

Mark  

Secretary just dropped off an Amazon envelope with my copy delivered this morning...can't wait to get home tonight and crack it open!