Brighton Tri Club Swim coaching blog - Nov 17
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Swim training should consist of the right mix of technique and fitness work. You cannot become a better swimmer by swimming lots of fast lengths if your technique is holding you back, nor can you improve your swim speed by purely concentrating on drills and technique. Technique work incorporates specific drills to ensure you focus on a particular aspect of the stroke. These often use fins or pull buoys, and should always be performed deliberately and conscientiously. Do not rush the drills to get to the ‘real swimming’!
The fitness work should consist of the right mix of endurance swimming, threshold swimming and sprinting. Triathletes looking to swim/race distances of 750m or more should limit the amount of sprint work (short intervals of 25-50 metres with long recoveries). Most of our training sessions will, therefore, be focussed on either endurance swimming (longer intervals of 400 metres or more with relatively short recoveries) or threshold-paced swimming.
Threshold paced swimming is also known as your critical swim speed (CSS), and we measure it during the CSS test. It’s the pace you should be able to race at for 1500m. The CSS time is a time per 100 metres (4 lengths). We will test this periodically throughout the year. You can see how your swimming is improving, and we can use to provide focussed swim coaching sessions. The best improvements in your swim speed will come from training at or around your CSS speed. The best device for ensuring you swim at this pace, is the Finis Tempo Trainer Pro. It is a small electronic device, which you wear under your swim cap so you can hear it beep after a certain number of seconds. You can therefore set it to beep when you should reach the end of every length (CSS time divided by 4). Try to keep to the beep! It is harder than it sounds. Our natural tendency is to start much too fast, and then progressively get slower. Try to keep these sets evenly paced throughout. It may even feel ‘too slow’ initially, but it certainly won’t by the end of the set.
Have a look at Swim Smooth head coach, Paul Newsome explain the concept of CSS and why we test it above.
The best device for ensuring you swim at this pace is the Finis Tempo Trainer Pro. It is a small electronic device, which you wear under your swim cap so you can hear it beep after a certain number of seconds. You can, therefore, set it to beep when you should reach the end of every length (CSS time divided by 4). Try to keep to the beep! It is harder than it sounds. Our natural tendency is to start much too fast, and then progressively get slower. Try to keep these sets evenly paced throughout. It may even feel ‘too slow’ initially, but it certainly won’t by the end of the set.
The club has invested in a number of Tempo Trainers to use at club sessions. Don’t be scared of the Tempo Trainers, or the club sessions! Club swimming is really the best way to improve your overall swimming technique and fitness. We recommend three sessions a week- two club sessions, plus one additional session. You can use this to focus on any specific swim faults you are aware of.
At Brighton Tri Club, we use the Swim Smooth coaching philosophy. If you’re not familiar with it, you can read all about it here. Do sign up for the blog as well, it has loads of useful information in it.
http://www.swimsmooth.com/beginner.php
Lastly, if you’ve never been to a club swim session before, have a read of This Document which explains what to expect, and gives guidance on lane swimming in a club setting, plus which swim aids we recommend (pull buoys and fin etc).