The secret to learning fast (distance) swimming?

Triathlon Forum
22

Thais is what i’ve always thought, and i think the guys/girls who have a hard time with swimming as adults prob would have had just as hard a time as kids. As for myself, one of my early instructors, when i was 4 yrs old or thereabouts, said he didn’t think i’d ever learn to swim, but eventually it just clicked. I think possibly the biggest thing was that i just loved being in the water, espec in the South Carolina summers when the heat and humidity are pretty intense. And even now, i still like being in the water more than being on dry land:)

I think this might be ignoring some of the life factors that limit us as we get older. Someone that learns to swim as a young person in high school has built a technical basis during a time in their life when they have relatively few commitments and pressures on their time. To pick up swimming in your 20’s or 30’s you are likely working or have a family or other pressures on your time. Of course you can still dedicate the time to learn how to swim fast, but it takes much more commitment as an adult than it does as a kid.

23

My coaching experience was the opposite of many here. I have taught both young and older swimmers, and the older ones progressed so much faster due to their ability to focus and actually do what was told. The Kids take so much more repeating and emphasis, although their systems are amazing. I always loved my adult classes as they grew so quickly

24

final thing to work on, is the arm baloney. Lot easier on the arms in general, if you work from the feet up.

Having taught and helped many AOS swimmers, I would disagree with this.

The order of priority should be with the worst flaws first. Start with the flaws that have the biggest impact on drag first. For some AOS swimmers, that is the head or arms or upper body. But for others, it is the legs or hips or lower body. And I would never discount what a swimmer’s arms are doing. Some good research has indicated that fast swimmers are differentiated from slower swimmers by several critical elements. One is that they have excellent distance per stroke (not a higher stroke rate). Another element is that they typically apply a lot more effective force in the first part of their underwater pull (EVF, etc.). Also, in my personal experience, many many AOS swimmers that I have taught came to me doing odd things with their arm entries that added a huge amount of drag every stroke they took. So, when I teach, we fix that pronto.

I’ve been deep in the mix with two swim clubs our TSUN and the Breakers, surrounded by renowned coaches and still had to teach myself really. It’s been a humorous & tortuous journey starting with a *Canadian redneck stroke *(looks like somebody trying to chop firewood in a bigfoot suit, whilst drowning) to mutiny on the beach in my first OWS - I raced with a snorkel, almost collapsing the tube. (Hey at least I didn’t have a domestique, that was on my first race :slight_smile: Funky learn to swim gadgets and drills as seen on here and other hocus-pocus. But you know what I thought was right early on, was actually right.

In our swim clubs, the coaches don’t coach per se. They run a process or factory. A feeder mill for swim Canada. I’ve got a ton of knowledge now, but the only coaching I have done with my son is to get a cap on his head for racing. I also checked his stroke timing last year it was great. There is very little stroke technique advice given & no video above or below water. And yet these ~ 10-18 year olds are busting out AAA times that can slam dunk triathlete swimmers with authority. It’s pretty amazing, but there are physical reasons for it.

Anyway AOS is a special (head) case, the clubs rules don’t fit. And while I agree we are all after quick results, my AOS program would be very different. So I’ll just throw it out there:

#1 Video the swim stroke, from pool deck, side and front
#2 Read the riot act. e.g. “your stroke looks like a bigfoot trying to chop firewood whilst drowning” and “you have no kick”
#3 State clearly what it’s going to take, in terms of commitment in the pool and dryland work. (See JohnnyO’s post.)
#4 ON THE SNORKEL : Start in streamline, kicking, until they say “uncle”.
#5 Getting a long profile in the water
#6 Introduce mini strokes or sculls
#7 Re-take Video: I wouldn’t advance past here until I could see some potential
#8 I would also not execute a full stroke until timing of and a level body position has been cleary established.

Super boring, and I doubt anyone would have the patience to stay with the program. But that is my initial take.

25

The main difference, IMO between kids and adults is that kids have a built-in reinforcement mechanism in that they are growing and getting bigger and stronger each year.

The main difference between kids and adults learning to swim is the same as adults and kids trying to learn a foreign language. Mental plasticity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0

26

Started swimming 7 years ago at the age of 30. Must have been 2:15 per 100m at the time.

Thought I was “All that” until i saw the masters swimmers. Decided to join them. Started with the old ladies lane. Determined to get to that “fast” lane.

Fast forward to now, 7 years later, sub 1-hr ironman swimmer, leading that fast lane (we’re not THAT fast, lol)

It’s come down to this for me:

  • Swim hard
  • Swim lots
  • You must get comfortable being uncomfortable.
  • Having feet to chase is incredibly valuable. There is no way i would get to where I am on my own. Those guys pushed me.
27

Thais is what i’ve always thought, and i think the guys/girls who have a hard time with swimming as adults prob would have had just as hard a time as kids. As for myself, one of my early instructors, when i was 4 yrs old or thereabouts, said he didn’t think i’d ever learn to swim, but eventually it just clicked. I think possibly the biggest thing was that i just loved being in the water, espec in the South Carolina summers when the heat and humidity are pretty intense. And even now, i still like being in the water more than being on dry land:)

I think this might be ignoring some of the life factors that limit us as we get older. Someone that learns to swim as a young person in high school has built a technical basis during a time in their life when they have relatively few commitments and pressures on their time. To pick up swimming in your 20’s or 30’s you are likely working or have a family or other pressures on your time. Of course you can still dedicate the time to learn how to swim fast, but it takes much more commitment as an adult than it does as a kid.

Well, i guess whether one has more or less time as an adult depends on one’s job situation. For me personally, i’ve been fortunate in that i’ve always been able to finish my work in well under 40 hrs, and hence could take a long lunch if i wanted to swim, run, or bike at lunch. At times, i’ve swum in the morning before work, run at lunch, and then rode and run again after work. I’m not married but i was for a few yrs and my spouse did not object to my training, since at least she knew where she could find me, and she knew i wasn’t “fooling around” with another girl:)

28

The main difference, IMO between kids and adults is that kids have a built-in reinforcement mechanism in that they are growing and getting bigger and stronger each year.

The main difference between kids and adults learning to swim is the same as adults and kids trying to learn a foreign language. Mental plasticity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0

Well, that’s a good point:)

29

Swimmer: 11 yrs vs 55 yrs

Good Posture: Yes / no
Bad Habits: no / yes
Stamina: ok / yes
Listening: no / yes

Flexible :Yes / marginal
Strength: no / yes
Injuries: no / yes

Pool Time : 6hrs / 4-6hrs
Speed : Yes / sort of (ability to spin quickly)
Recovery : Yes / takes longer
Excess Girth : No / a bit
Racing: Yes / No
Technique: good / good
Diet : Good/ Good

Start Date Sept vs Jan

My son and I were about equal times last summer. I was hurt big time through the fall to January and he’s vaulted ahead - is doing around 5:20 on 400M, 1:15 100M. The differences I see are the having to deal with previous injuries, posture correction (which is not easy to do), flexibility and putting in a block of pool time. Technique is good enough.

30

Reading the swim thread, there is lots of interesting, if conflicting, input. But I think a lot of it does not come from athletes that have actually been through the entire journey.

So, here is an idea, lets get some direct, intentionally anecdotal, accounts from successful Adult Onset Swimmers (AOS) who personally have done this:

  • Started out swim training no earlier than age 20 (training, not playing around in the water as a kid).
  • Started out swimming quite slow (so anything around 2:00 per 100 yds for, say, and all-out 800yd pool swim).
  • But have now progressed to swimming better than 1:15 per 100 yds for an all-out 800.

If you have done this, or have done something very similar, all as an adult without being part of a youth swimming program as a youngster, what do you think has made it possible for you to do this?

I can start:

  • Joined a masters group.
  • Got lots of direct and highly specific stroke instruction to fix my specific technique flaws.
  • Swam a lot.

And I can say this with certainty: I could not have gotten faster without fixing my technique flaws. Because I swam lots and lots of yards with crappy technique and I only got only a little faster. But when my technique was fixed with some one-on-one input, holy toledo, things really changed. Because, immediately after that, I got hugely faster with no increase in yards.

Greg @ dsw

Not me, but a friend. When she first raced elite at the AUS national tri champs (aged early 20’s, didn’t start swimming till age 21), she was a 25+ 1500m swimmer whilst swimming ~25k per week (solo). Within a year of switching to a very good coach (who worked pretty hard on her technique), her time dropped about 5 mins to sub 21, along with a 5.19 400SCM, with no extra distance.

When I first swam with her, she was all over the place, her timing was off, her elbows were dropping - her 25 minute 1500 was achieved with raw fitness. She looked like a different swimmer a year later.

31

Is this the thread where people brag how they swam a 55 just to end up running a 4 hour marathon? Cool cool.

32

Is this the thread where people brag how they swam a 55 just to end up running a 4 hour marathon? Cool cool.
Yeah, so give us our space, man!

33

So, here is an idea, lets get some direct, intentionally anecdotal, accounts from successful Adult Onset Swimmers (AOS) who personally have done this:

  • Started out swim training no earlier than age 20 (training, not playing around in the water as a kid).
  • Started out swimming quite slow (so anything around 2:00 per 100 yds for, say, and all-out 800yd pool swim).
  • But have now progressed to swimming better than 1:15 per 100 yds for an all-out 800.

I personally did this and have coached a couple who have done it as well. First of all, it’s legitimately rare, and the further from 20, the more rare it is.

But like Ken, and Dave and you alluded to; the one common thing I find is that the people who can make those huge jumps in swim speed can make stroke technique changes and have them stick. Some also have the innate feel for what will work, but all of them are able to make permanent stroke changes. Plasticity as Dave mentioned.

I know a few ways to help folks without good plasticity, but it’s playing on the edges. Mostly it seems like you either have good plasticity or you don’t.

34

Started “swimming” when I was 20 for fitness. It actually had nothing to do with triathlon. I think I swam a 1500 in 28 minutes and thought I was smoking fast. I did my first sprint tri when I was 23. Then I got into swimming more seriously. My wife - who had no competitive swimming experience - became my “coach” because she’s a good study. She researched how to coach, and then she came to watch me swim for a lot of my swims… and she kicked my butt. Workouts like 3x1500 for time. (She’d found some collegiate swim coach’s blog… to my demise.) She and I watched a ton of videos on technique. We went through Total Immersion, which helped with my hip balance issues.

So after all our/her hard work, I swam a 23:XX when I was 24. We thought “I’d arrived.”

Then I moved to Ohio with work and joined a really solid masters swim team. Multiple former D1 swimmer and a couple masters world title holders (one of them won the 200 fly).

We didn’t have an on-deck coach, they would usually stand on-deck during the warmup and help people with technique during a prescribed warmup sequence. Then they’d jump in and swim the main sets with us. But that alone was enough to open my eyes to the things that my wife and I hadn’t fixed (or I’d resisted changing even though she’d called me out on it… yeah I’m stubborn).

So after a few months swimming in the 2nd lane, the coaches told me I was “ready” to move to the fast lane and swim with the super fast guys.

That’s when everything changed. That’s when I was exposed to a level of discomfort that I’d never before pictured while swimming. Descending sets. Intervals that were theoretically impossible to keep… but I did it anyways because I wanted to keep up. 30 minute TT’s, followed by 10x 50 all out. That kind of thing. After two years of suffering through all of that, I finally clocked a 19:XX swim time in an Olympic at age 27.

So for me it was technique first. But then I had to put the hard work in. And a LOT of it.

35

So, here is an idea, lets get some direct, intentionally anecdotal, accounts from successful Adult Onset Swimmers (AOS) who personally have done this:

  • Started out swim training no earlier than age 20 (training, not playing around in the water as a kid).
  • Started out swimming quite slow (so anything around 2:00 per 100 yds for, say, and all-out 800yd pool swim).
  • But have now progressed to swimming better than 1:15 per 100 yds for an all-out 800.

I personally did this and have coached a couple who have done it as well. First of all, it’s legitimately rare, and the further from 20, the more rare it is.

But like Ken, and Dave and you alluded to; the one common thing I find is that the people who can make those huge jumps in swim speed can make stroke technique changes and have them stick. Some also have the innate feel for what will work, but all of them are able to make permanent stroke changes. Plasticity as Dave mentioned.

I know a few ways to help folks without good plasticity, but it’s playing on the edges. Mostly it seems like you either have good plasticity or you don’t.

I’ve known about 8-10 guys who took up swimming after age 20 and became very good swimmers. About half took up the sport to do triathlons, but the other half simply thought swimming looked like something fun to do. Their 100 free times range from around 53 to 1:00, but a couple also became excellent stroke swimmers, e.g. one guy who was a classic “Arnie” in the Swim Smooth terminology, swam a 58 100 fly and 54.6 100 free. Another guy got down to 1:08 for 100 breast in his early 50s, and a third guy swam 2:25 for 200 back which is pretty quick IMO.

I think you’re spot on about the “plasticity”, which i’ve always thought of simply as coordination, really, as if a person is well coordinated, then they can make changes as needed. Do you think coordination is a decent term for the ability to learn to change your form in swimming???

36

I think you’re spot on about the “plasticity”, which i’ve always thought of simply as coordination, really, as if a person is well coordinated, then they can make changes as needed. Do you think coordination is a decent term for the ability to learn to change your form in swimming???

I really like Dave’s term of plasticity.

A person with good plasticity can become coordinated, but they may not be there now. The coach can identify these people before they are fast or before their technique is particularly good, or before their motions are well coordinated. I have the opposite side of the coin, a lady who is decently well coordinated, not super or anything but a 1:08 scy freesyle lady, pretty solid in the tri world, slow for a swimmer. At any rate, she has what she has, she can’t make changes to her stroke at all. So while her coordination is OK, her plasticity is bad.

But it sounds like you understand what I mean and we are discussing semantics.

37

I think you’re spot on about the “plasticity”, which i’ve always thought of simply as coordination, really, as if a person is well coordinated, then they can make changes as needed. Do you think coordination is a decent term for the ability to learn to change your form in swimming???

I really like Dave’s term of plasticity.

A person with good plasticity can become coordinated, but they may not be there now. The coach can identify these people before they are fast or before their technique is particularly good, or before their motions are well coordinated. I have the opposite side of the coin, a lady who is decently well coordinated, not super or anything but a 1:08 scy freestyle lady, pretty solid in the tri world, slow for a swimmer. At any rate, she has what she has, she can’t make changes to her stroke at all. So while her coordination is OK, her plasticity is bad.
But it sounds like you understand what I mean and we are discussing semantics.

Hmmm, I see what you mean, i guess i’ve always thought any 1:08 freestyler could change their stroke if needed but apparently not. So, “plasticity” it is then:)

38

Reading the swim thread, there is lots of interesting, if conflicting, input. But I think a lot of it does not come from athletes that have actually been through the entire journey.

So, here is an idea, lets get some direct, intentionally anecdotal, accounts from successful Adult Onset Swimmers (AOS) who personally have done this:

  • Started out swim training no earlier than age 20 (training, not playing around in the water as a kid).
  • Started out swimming quite slow (so anything around 2:00 per 100 yds for, say, and all-out 800yd pool swim).
  • But have now progressed to swimming better than 1:15 per 100 yds for an all-out 800.

If you have done this, or have done something very similar, all as an adult without being part of a youth swimming program as a youngster, what do you think has made it possible for you to do this?

I can start:

  • Joined a masters group.
  • Got lots of direct and highly specific stroke instruction to fix my specific technique flaws.
  • Swam a lot.

And I can say this with certainty: I could not have gotten faster without fixing my technique flaws. Because I swam lots and lots of yards with crappy technique and I only got only a little faster. But when my technique was fixed with some one-on-one input, holy toledo, things really changed. Because, immediately after that, I got hugely faster with no (further) increase in yards.

Greg @ dsw

This is really an awesome post and really resonates with me. At age 62 started doing master’s workouts for the last 5 months and have made as much progress in that time as the previous couple of years. Got a new coach three weeks ago and made a quick breakthrough based on her feedback on my stroke. Until age 57 I had never swum more than a few hundred yards in the pool and was not comfortable with freestyle, mostly did breaststroke. After a few months of swimming had progressed to 1500 y workouts and a sustained pace of a bit over 2:00 /100 y. But worked hard and made continuous progress. Spent a couple of years stuck at doing my 100 repeats in 1:30-35 and a sustained pace of 1:40-45 or so. Now I’m seeing repeats in the 1:23-4 range and yesterday did a timed 20 minute time trial and held 1:30 pace (that’s with open turns, can do flip turns but still not that comfortable with them).

I still only consider myself an intermediate swimmer, looked up some results at master’s swim meets and I’d be one of the odd BOP outliers but hoping to some day to reach the level where I can show up for a master’s meet and maybe get close to MOP, but if I can do that I’ll be killing the tri swim splits.

So many triathletes are stuck in their “the swim isn’t that important” mindset and not willing to challenge themselves with master’s workouts or a real swim coach. Just wish I’d done it sooner and will say it’s really fun to learn a new skill at my age!

39

I have been swimming with a masters group for 10 months (~3 swims per week), and before that i swam with a triathlon club that had organized swims 2x per week (would throw in solo swim when i could). I go back and forth on if masters has helped me, here are the pros and cons as i see it, curious as to if anyone has similar experiences. I am a 31-35 HIM swimmer

Masters Pros:
Increased focus on technique: we do 700-1000 of drills/warm up, vs ~300 combined when i used to swim with a tri club
More feedback: The coaching is better and I get more feedback than when i swam with the tri club, because their coaches gave a lot of attention to beginners
More opportunities to swim: there are options to swim every day but sunday, which is great
Longer workouts: 90 minutes vs 60 minutes means you have more time for warm up, drills, main set, etc. It is easier to get close to 4K in this setting, usually 2800-3000 with my old group

Masters Cons:
Some of the drill work and warm up feels like junk yards. Last night for example we did 1250 of drill/warm up, that took up a lot of time and I feel only half of it was of real value
Too much feedback: I feel like i get too many different types of feedback, despite it all coming from the same coach. I come from golf, so i know that you can only have 1-2 swing thoughts at once. I feel like they bounce around with what they want me to work on at times
Lack of triathlon focus: they have to cater to a number of types of swimmers, and sometimes i think the workouts are not as aligned with my goals as maybe the triathlon club workouts were… I sometimes wonder if I maximized my 90 minutes

overall i enjoy the group training, the coaching, and the program, but after a less than stellar swim at Oceanside, if I don’t show some progress through the end of the year, I will have some decisions to make.

40

…So many triathletes are stuck in their “the swim isn’t that important” mindset and not willing to challenge themselves with master’s workouts or a real swim coach. Just wish I’d done it sooner and will say it’s really fun to learn a new skill at my age!
But I’m only 40 and if I make those improvements now what will I have left to look forward to?
My plan is to gradually improve my training volume and format, my technique, and my race strategy as I age to compensate for any drop in natural physiological ability so that my times never dip. this seems more feasible and sustainable if I set the bar low to begin with.

41

Too much feedback: I feel like i get too many different types of feedback, despite it all coming from the same coach. I come from golf, so i know that you can only have 1-2 swing thoughts at once. I feel like they bounce around with what they want me to work on at times .

I think this is where a lot of swimmers are hesitant in the group setting. Have a dialogue with your coach - tell them what you were focusing on, ask them to watch for improvement in specific areas, before moving on to other. Also, with swimming, so many things are interrelated that while it may seem like overload, often a different perspective changes the mindset, and the fix comes. Ex - a guy in my group was having trouble keeping his elbow up on his entry, often slapping with a flat arm, or elbow before fingertips. The coach kept telling him to keep his elbow up for weeks - then he suggested to the swimmer to stay on his side longer to keep his shoulder up, and voila! Fixed entry.