Efficiency First: How to Swim Faster without Wasting Energy
Efficiency First: How to Swim Faster without Wasting Energy
By Peter Scott
First appeared in Tri BC Newsletter March 2009.
In the last article, I talked about how to optimize your off-season training by improving your swim stroke with patient practice. Taking care to develop increased body awareness, balance, timing and whole-body propulsion in the will pay off in the long run.
Mastery of the freestyle stroke comes with quality practice. Like a musician, you must break down your stroke and focus on one aspect at a time before putting it all together. This takes patience-contrary to the “go hard” approach that is still common among triathletes at each level. But once you make it a part of your swim practice, you will see amazing results.
This is also true when you want to swim faster in a triathlon.
The biggest discouragement to a triathlete in the swim is working too hard:
• In your race, going anaerobic means that you may feel anxious, out of breath, and will not be race as well on the bike.
• In your training, swims that put you in the anaerobic zone will require more time for recovery. Add to that your recovery requirements for your biking and running and you are in danger of overtraining.
This means you have to find a way to swim faster without resorting to churning through the water.
Swimming Gears
It may surprise you to know that most long-distance swimmers develop stroke cadences or gears to swim in full control during a race. Just as Lance Armstrong helped to change people’s perspective on efficient pedal cadences, the stroke frequency is something good swimmers practice consistently. Gears help them avoid going out too hard, falling behind by taking it too easy, and helps them decide whether or not respond to a faster or slower race pace in a pack.
Even more counterintuitive is that the difference between going at an “easy” pace and fast is that of only a couple of strokes per 25m. An efficient and smoothly coordinated stroke makes it possible.
Gears for Aerobic, Long Distance Swimming
Baseline gear (G), that is, the number of arm strokes per 25m is a number that may vary from week to week by a stroke or two and will often decrease with time as you become more efficient and/or become faster with the same effort.
Next we have the aerobic gears:
1st gear - G + 1 stroke per 25m
2nd gear – G + 2 strokes per 25m
3rd gear – G + 3 strokes per 25m
Staying below lactate threshold most of the time will allow for more focused swimming, attention to technique and active recovery. In general, this will correlate with G+1, 2, or 3. This is by no means a rule!
Pool swimmers who do sprint and high-intensity endurance swims will use 4th and 5th or even 6th gears more frequently than triathletes in their practice. If you are able to maintain great technique at 3rd gear, there is great value in experimenting with keeping things together at higher gears., now and then, in terms of discovering more efficient ways of moving through the water. But don’t overdo it!
Improving Speed without Sacrificing Technique or Overtraining
Okay, so given that attention to technique is vital for improvement, how do you get faster year after year and still improve your speed? How can you develop an instinct for your race pacing for an open water swim?
The key here is simple enough that I’ll emphasize it here:
Learn to retain your best technique at higher and higher gears.
I think everyone has had the experience of trying to go faster and feeling ragged and completely out of breath and not going much faster at all. When this happens you need to back off and return to a lower gear and drills.
If you push through and let your stroke disintegrate, you will simply waste more and more energy trying to go a little bit faster and imprint worsening technique. This is a disaster for training for sustainable speed.
For example, if on a 10 x 100m set on 10-20 seconds of rest (or some similar variation time, distance and interval) you struggle to complete it, most likely your technique is suffering, not your aerobic fitness. I’m assuming here that you are at a level of fitness appropriate for the running and biking exertion of your chosen triathlon distance, whether it’s a Sprint, Olympic or Ironman race.
Intervals are a vital part of swim training. However, each set should help imprint excellent technique. Instead of looking for a hard swim, choose intervals that you can make with relative ease and in good form, then gradually increase stroke rates while retaining that control.
How to Practice
Here is how you can start with gears practice and gradually increase the effort:
Warm-up: a 20-25 minute warm up with drills and technique focused swimming, especially on core rotation to drive your stroke. You want to prepare your body and mind to keep technique good as you gradually swim faster and faster.
Swim 4 x 25m with as relaxed and fluid a freestyle as you can. Count your strokes (single arm strokes) and then average them out. This is your baseline gear (G).
Next, swim another 4 x 25m trying to achieve the baseline gear (G) on each length. This helps you start to develop control over stroke count and an innate sense of cadence.
At this point you’ve established your baseline gear for the practice on that day. Don’t worry too much about getting the absolutely lowest baseline stroke count. In fact, having that as a goal can cause problems with your stroke mechanics if you focus on it too much.
Your challenge now is to swim faster simply by increasing your cadence by adding one stroke at a time per 25m rather than “working” harder. Focus on your core to set the timing as you switch from side to side.
Now it’s time to experiment with achieving different gears:
4 x 25m @ baseline gear (G) - measured in strokes per 25m
4 x 25m @ G + 1
4 x 25m @ G + 2
4 x 25m @ G + 3
Rest interval: rest 10-15 seconds between each 25m or however long you need for full concentration on achieving the desired gear/stroke count) Rest fully between each gear set so you can give the challenge your full attention.
This is a really basic set. Once you can achieve desired stroke counts consistently, you can add the following variations:
1. Change gears on every 25m.
2. Ascend and descend gears over a given distance (add or subtract stroke averages per 25m).
3. Mix up gears for a given distance (for example: 1st, G, 3rd, 2nd)
4. Throw in a 4th gear lap or two, now and then, to test your ability to swim faster and stay efficient.
The power of this kind of practice is that you attempt to preserve the stroke mechanics you’ve worked hard to imprint at slower speeds by gradually increasing your cadence. Reducing drag, especially at higher stroke rates, is always more important than swimming harder.
You will also see that swimming faster does require more effort and you'll begin to get a sense of the efficiency trade offs that certain speeds demand and the conditioning and practice required to hold your form at higher speeds.
Having a gear practice will also give you confidence in your races to swim according to your own plan and at a pace that you can maintain without getting tired. With enough practice, your body will intuitively sense the right gear for the race.
Try it out and let me know if you have any questions or feedback!
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Peter Scott is a swim coach and founder of Sea Hiker Adventures, based in Vancouver, BC, a swim coaching and instruction company dedicated to helping people excel in triathlons and other open water pursuits. Peter has helped hundreds of triathletes and swimmers of all levels improve technique and enjoy the water more than ever before. He is an aquatic trainer at the YWCA Vancouver and teaches programs for swimmers and triathletes of all levels. For more tips, video clips and articles, visit www.seahiker.com.
Questions about this article? Email Peter at info@seahiker.com