A bit of swim coaching this morning. As I have done for the last two weeks I was down to Bicton Baths this morning to provide a bit of swim guidance to my mate.
The main set this morning was a series of 6 broken 200s. Bicton is 33m long and so the break looked a bit like this:
100m flat out - 10 seconds rest
66m flat out - 10 seconds rest
33m flat out - 90 seconds rest.
The idea of the broken effort is that you can to sustain high intensity over a race distance without it entirely killing you (just almost). Having 90 seconds rest in between also meant that it was possible to almost fully recover between efforts, meaning that the quality of the efforts could be maintained.
It isn't a set that I would usually give to a triathlete, but as I have said before, my mate is keen to improve his pool speed, particularly in distances between 400m and 1500m. He is already doing a lot of work to improve his anaerobic capacity so these Tuesday morning sessions are all about speed.
Obviously I wasn't swimming the flat out efforts, but I know from painful experience just how hard these efforts can be. Having the break makes you think they are going to be much easier than a usual 200, which makes you attack them harder. In the end the break does make the effort easier, but typically the benefit of the break is outweighed by the extra effort that you put in. That was certainly the case for my mate this morning.
Watching my mate swim this morning I was struck by another obvious improvement that is needed in order for him to swim quickly in the pool. He doesn't tumble turn.
I know tumble turning is a hot topic among triathletes. A lot of triathletes view is that a triathlon doesn't have a tumble turn so why bother learning them. To me this is a fairly lazy attitude and I sometimes wonder how much that attitude is simply covering up a person's unwillingness to learn something new. In the end a swim training session is made more effective by tumble turning as a person isn't getting a mini break at the end of each lap. It also makes a person way quicker, which is a nice side effect.
Once again I wonder how much of people's unwillingness to tumble turn comes from a perception that it is hard to learn. For people who are perhaps new to swimming I can understand that perception, but the reality is that it simply isn't true. I remember being taught how to tumble turn as a kid in four easy steps and within the course of about 20 minutes I had it. I used the same technique to teach my wife and now she tumbles comfortably.
I will go into the four steps in more detail another time, but in brief they are:
- Swim to the wall and do a somersault, end standing up facing the wall - keep doing that until you are comfortable.
- Swim to the wall and do a somersault ending with your feet on the wall - don't push off.
- Swim to the wall and do a somersault ending with your feet on the wall, push off on your back
- Swim to the wall and do a somersault ending up with your feet on the wall, push off on your back and roll over as you glide away.
Obviously a tumble turn has a bit more than that, but the above four steps will give you the basics. From there the rest is simply refinement which will come with practice. The nice thing about swimming in a pool is that you will get to practice your tumble turn about 60 times in a 3000m session. Easy.
I plan on using these four step process to teach my mate to tumble turn once we are back from Darwin. I expect that doing so will gain him a second or so per 100m. He is already cruising at 85 to 90 seconds per 100m, so gaining a full second by doing nothing other than modifying his technique is a big gain and an important improvement given his current focus on pool swimming.
Back down to the pool in the morning, but this time for a bit of coaching with the SwimSmooth squad at the Wednesday morning Red Mist session. Fun.
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