Improving at swimming

What about a local tri club? Do you have any of those close by?

Check out the Total Immersion website. Here is a good video to start with:

http://www.totalimmersion.net/store/dvds/easy-freestyle-21st-centur...

It depends on what your goals are and what your current ability level is.

If you are just starting out, check out your local pools. Adult swim lessons might be offered -- or stop by during an age-group workout & take a look at the things the kids are doing and what the coaches say from time-to-time. Heck, even ask the coaches what certain drills/sets are doing for the athletes.

If you just want to be more 'comfortable' in the water, give TI a shot. But if your goal is to get to MOP or FOP, it might not be for you.

If you want more technical advice, check out USMS.org -- there are swimming related forums there & a continuing thread titled "Ande's swimiming tips: swimming faster faster" There are a lot of tips (some useful, others not so useful) that you can look through for ideas about things to 'tweak' during your practices.

You'll get the best help from swimming with others & getting feedback from them about your stroke. I also find that I tend to work a bit harder when there is someone swimming with me and tend to 'tank' fewer sets. So if you can find a couple tri-buddies to swim with, that'd be best.

Good Luck!
Dan

edited to get the full thread name correctly input

Edited by oldntrin 2010-04-28 3:30 PM

This is a real misconception. TI advocates balance and streamlining in the water...prerequisites for going fast. If you don't have those things going for you, you can still go fast, but you'll work a heck of a lot harder doing so. Improving your streamline position in the water means you can use less energy to go the same speed.

Thanks, everyone. Good advice. I'm still trying to find a group or individual who meet near me and early in the morning, but I'll check out the TI stuff as well.

I was puzzled by this when I looked at your race logs & swim splits, but then I went to your website & see that you offer TI courses as part of your training package. Then things made more sense.

I don't disagree that TI can provide "prerequisites" for going fast. I disagree that you will get fast (or much beyond the back of MOP) by only using TI. Ex: long division is a prerequisite for calculus, but you can't do calculus just because you know long division.

i think TI can work for some epople, not at all for others. i tried it, but it was not for me, i just got a long, low stroke count and slowed down.

most of my swim improvement came from watching swimmers and imitating them. and swimming a lot

Not sure what the puzzling is about. My race logs haven't been updated for 6 years.

You can swim TI fast or slow. Taking a balanced streamlined position in the water and doing it faster requires significantly more concentration and patient practice than doing it slow in order to prevent stroke breakdown. As you increase your tempo, your stroke length will decrese due to less time for glide, so you need to find the optimum stroke count, not the minimum stroke count for any given speed.

If the only goal is to minimize stroke count, then yes, you'll swim slowly.

The math of speed is simple:
Velocity = stroke rate x stroke length.

TI does not contradict this.

I think at the end of the day, what's important is to not become to married to any one principal of training. I have gone down many roads in training. I used to try and run and bike with a 90 candence. Didn't work for me. I tried Netwon's and Chi running, didn't work for me. I thought I could never race with anything but HR and have since learned to also use pace and RPE.

Don't become too fixated on any one concpet, pick and choose those protocols that work best for you from all the available principals.

Bravo!  I couldn't agree with you more.