Use gravity to your advantage.
There are many ways to swim faster of course. And while all the reading is good, you have to try them at some point.
So I wanted to give you a few simple and specific ones to try in your next pool session.
Let’s start off from a swim Skate position. As you know, in Skating you have a high side and a low side.
(The low side is where your arm is fully extended.)
For this discussion, let’s assume that your left arm is in the lead extended position. And the right arm is ready to pierce in the Swing Skate position.
We’ll focus on the right side only in this article. Here are four focal points you can practice to increase your speed. [read on…]
Pay attention to your hands while swimming.
Do you have days when you don’t feel your swim is going too smooth?
Or do you sometimes experience a disconnect between what you think you’re doing and what you’re actually doing?
It happens to me for sure.
This is why I like video as learning tool. It helps make those mind-body connections.
The problem with video though is that it’s not real time.
Sure, it’s great for an after swim review. But it doesn’t help you while you’re swimming in an Olympic triathlon.
You have other visual aids though. One of them is the position of your hands. Here are three things they can tell you. [read on…]
Total Immersion Swimming in San Diego
We recently completed a workshop for future Total Immersion swim instructors here in San Diego.
We had a great group of swim coaches come in from various parts of the country.
Terry Laughlin and Shinji Takeuchi (Total Immersion leadership) came to San Diego to run the swim workshop .
(By the way, Shinji happens to be the YouTube swimmer. At close to 1.8 million hits, for this one swim video alone, he is second only to Michael Phelps!)
Seven days. All swimming. All the time. It was great.
I came over to assist with the workshop. I’ve been pretty busy with coaching the last few months. So I really appreciated the time to just be a passive participant.
As a result, I learned (or re-learned) a lot of stuff. Here are four: [read on…]
Just jump in!
The problem with a lot of new year resolutions is that they’re not broken into bite sized pieces. Like below:
- Lose 10 pounds
- Run a marathon
- Visit three countries you’ve never been to before
That’s all that’s written down.
Then, you recover from the Holidays and January is over. Work starts to get busy in February and March. Before you know it, 25% of the year is done an you haven’t started on your resolutions.
Let’s take the case of the marathon. So you finally decide to look into it. You find out that:
- The entry deadline has passed
- You didn’t realize that the date of your local marathon conflicts with an important family event you already committed to
- The marathons that you can realistically sign up for are less than four month away
So, while you still have options to run one, it just became that much harder to get started. Oh, and after you get sign-up, you also have to run the 400-600 miles it will take to train for it. Then you have to run 26.2 miles in one day. [read on…]
