The buoy will restrict your rotation and you notice it because you are a minimal kicker.
The kick is a major way to help rotate the body.

Fact is the workouts are not for you. ( They are only for the truly body positioned challenged )
You already have a high feet position and can maintain it without kicking your arse off.
You are gaining no benefit from this activity apart from learning a little how your stroke works and that putting a bouy between your legs hurts your already good stramlining.

Try it without the band, just buoy. You might not be as fast as you were naked because the snorkel is going to limit your O2, but bet you get most the way back and you are no longer doing a weight workout in the water..

Put on some paddles and then you will really be ready to fly!

Yes, with just buoy, I am nearly as fast as I am with no toys, probably 2sec/100 slower.

The band really slows me down, but I've seen videos of pros swimming really fast with them - am wondering if I should just stick with Purplepatch/Matt Dixon style to see if it helps at all?

Well fast is a relative term as you know, have to see how fast they go without the gear. But no doubt when you put that stuff on you sink your back half and are dragging yourself through the water, so just pulling really hard with a very unhydrodynamic hull.

Like I said, it would be similar to swimming in place with a band on, a strength workout. It might help you learn to pull more effectively and maybe you will feel how to get your feet up? But just grinding without any improvement on that time you are doing just seems like a little waste to me.

If I'm going to do resistance training in the water I want to also feel some extra speed along with it, so go with the paddles and the buoy, maybe the snorkel if you need it for some flaw that it might help. there again I can just go harder if I want to be out of breath, don't have to rebreathe old air for that..

 What are the bands teaching you? How to not practice the timing of your kick? I never use them.

My main reason for thinking of working on this is

1. I've been underwhelmed by my own times relative to pool times; maybe buoy swimming is closer to wetsuit swimming than not?

2. Usually in swimming, if I suck at it, it's a fairly certain sign that I can learn something from it!

How are your turns? Are you doing flip turns. All that gear could cost you a few seconds if your doing open turns.

Thats too big of a difference and something is definitely going on. Skip the band, work with just the snorkel for 5x100. Then go just buoy for 5x100. That should help you isolate which one is slowing you down.

Maybe try a new buoy?

I’ve found a single buoy to be not only useless but ultimately harmful to the shoulders. Taping two of the cylindrical ones together allows enough flotation, and unlike the chunkier 1-piece buoys they let you keep your legs together, which I find makes rotation easier.

Yeah, right now I'm losing more time on the no-flip snorkel turns, as I literally just got the snorkel. With the buoy alone though, I'm flip turning.

I think the snorkel right now is artificially slowing me since I'm clumsy with it, but still, I def can't pull at the same speed that I do when I'm nekkid, and can't work as hard.

Two questions -

1) Where are you placing the buoy? At your feet? At your crotch? If you are placing it at your feet, try at your crotch. The band is there so that you can't cheat and start kicking during the drill :-P!

2) Are you able to flip turn / or reasonably turn while using the snorkel?

I'm familiar with this workout - I was under Matt's program for about 2 years. I was also at two camps with him where he had us to that same drill. The main purpose/intent behind it is to focus on body "taughtness" - i.e., keeping a tight core and straight legs. You should not really loose much rotation with this from the upper body's perspective - if you are, you are doing something wrong.

I could never get the hang of a snorkel so I ditched - you might try that? It could be too many changes at once. Though, Matt told us at the camp once that the main reason for the snorkel is to eliminate the variable of bad breathing - so if you can breath well already, it's not helping you here. I.e., if you can breathe without looking up too high and without disrupting your body alignment (meaning it doesn't slow you down to take a breath).

Overall though, I don't do this drill anymore. I got way faster by getting a dedicated swim coach who yells at me right away when I mess up :-P! I do a lot of pulling though with paddles and the buoy so they are solid tools to have. If you get into breathstroke for the fun of it the band comes in handy there too!

Cool to hear from a Dixon-program person.

I tend to consider myself already pretty decent with body 'taughtness' - I learned to swim with a tight ankle band alone a few years back and while it slows me down a lot, I can do it no problemo. So adding the buoy actually makes it a lot easier for me. The snorkel right now is annoying for me, but I'll probably just learn to use it for kicks. I doubt I have breathing issues - I've timed myself on breath every cycle and then breathing as few as possible on 25s, 50s, and 100s, and I go the same speed up to 100s, and for anything longer, definitely faster with more breathing (oxygen!). I def don't lose time from the breath cycle.

Still, swimming with snorkel+buoy+band just feels weird to me. It's probably the decreased rotation - I literally feel like a huge chunk of my stroke power disappears. However, I've seen videos of pro/elite camps with gobs of folks swimming banded+buoy(+snorkel) not just with Dixon, so I'm wondering if I'm leaving some wetsuit speed on the table by not being able to do this well. (Right now, the wetsuit is equal in times to my non-wetsuit times; I often wonder if I should just ditch the wetsuit completely since it doesn't help me, and slows me in transition.)

that is a lot of toys at once! i m not a fan of snorkle. good for swimmer that swim a lot and get bored but i dont use it much as a teaching tool.

Different tools for different athlete. i can swim with a band only (no pull boey) and hold 1:10-15/100m/yards when i was fit. It s only a matter of position.

if you find yourself lacking rotation...learn to drive the stroke from the hips...drive the hips hard side to side...

I personally dont like the band with pull boey. It s either pull boey alone or band alone. not both together. they are both doing opposite goal for triathletes.

---

Jonathan Caron / Professional Coach / ironman champions / age group world champions
Jonnyo Coaching
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Oh. If you are good with band-only, that's a solid sign. It took me a little while to get to that too.

But yeah... like a few others said, this drill is a ton of gear and I found the snorkel too frustrating to stick with. On the wetsuit comment, I tried a sprint recently w/o a wetsuit and was surprised that I wasn't really any slower. If you haven't tried a race w/o, I say find one and try it - it's oddly freeing to go without!

I def prefer swimming w/o wetsuit, with one big caveat - sighting for me is much easier with the wetsuit due to buoyancy (no surprise). I could probably minimize the sighting difficulty by practicing it a lot more pre-race day (which I fully intend to do in my next goaround) but in my 3 races of this past season, 2 of them required a lot of sighting so the wetsuit was a welcome addition. In the other, it was a splash n dash where I knew the course, so I went without the wetsuit, and my pace was slightly faster (albeit hard to directly compare)

That's interesting.... I personally do not need the band, as I do not kick with a pullboy at all (feet only move with body rotation)....

I do see a lot of people kicking quite considerably despite having a pull boy in their crotch. They also swear they don't kick until they see the video footage.

I think the band makes sense for those who kick with a pullboy (majority of swimmers), which defeats the purpose of the pullboy as a training tool and makes it more of a crutch of the position-challenged Triathlete.

In the old days, with the pull boy, our coach would just tell us to cross and lock our feet at the ankle to eliminate kick.... That outed the 'cheaters' pretty quick.

Gave up using a buoy switch to a Roka Sim swimming improved greatly. Even devolved a kick which I had little or none

Leg bands are fun, but they're a drag promoting substitute for the simple discipline of holding a mono-leg posture without them. Why not do it with the least amount of drag and the most acute muscle recruitment possible? Good body position fore and aft--lifting the lower and upper body from the core and properly positioning the head--is the foundation of any effective kick rhythm. Mono-leg pull does a great job of promoting both.






I use "mono-legged pull" to mimic some of the proposed benefits of the band, while minimizing some of the negatives. In essence, the mono-leg pull just asks the swimmer to hold their legs together while pulling, as if they had only a single leg (hence, "mono-leg"). Whereas the band forces the legs together, the mono-leg pull asks the athletes to truly become aware of where and when the legs are kicking to counterbalance, and allows a small amount of wiggle, helping the athlete determine if the counter-balance is actually a HELP, rather than a hindrance. In this way a benefit is still gained by longer legged athletes, or those whose center of mass makes the optimal body position impossible without a kick. The athlete can also feel how a slim leg profile can help their legs "slip through the hole" opened by the upper body.

By “opposite effects,” what’s meant is that the band is used to make swimming pointedly more difficult, the pull buoy to make swimming significantly easier. The former forces you to focus very intently on certain aspects of your stroke, the latter takes care of the hip position aspect so that you can accumulate more quality repetitions in the pool. If an athlete is fresh and full of piss and vinegar, band-only sets might be a great idea. If said athlete is fatigued from a long bike or has already done some very intense swim sets, the pull buoy can allow them to get in a bunch of much-needed swim reps without their quality suffering.

As far as kicking with the pull buoy, as long as the athlete understands how their times with various toys correlate to their toy-free and race efforts, and doesn’t let their ego swell, it’s not the end of the world.

I can definitely do the monoband. Took me a bunch of practice, but I learned how to do it after getting the hang of a tight ankle band a few years ago.

While it's no issue for me, I actually don't think it's good advice to tell someone who has NEVER used an ankle band to try this. Invariably, they say 'sure, no problem!', and then they proceed to do minikicks that are far in excess of what an ankle band would allow, yet finish up saying 'felt good, how'd it look?' I don't know a single swimmer who could do this well without having drilled the heck out of a tight ankle band first, since those tiny kicks are offsetting small errors in their pull.

Those same folks who say they can do the monoleg pull but have never used a band - you strap 'em to the band tight, and they go <10 yards before their legs sink. I was in a tri masters group drop in a few times where the coach would start with monoleg pull, and then ask folks to bust out their bands. EVERYONE would make it through the monoleg pull and say not so bad, but as she passed out the extra ankle bands for the banded set right after, I think there were 3/20 people who could actually survive a single length, including me. Saw this happen at two different trimasters sessions!

Once you can do a tight ankle band though, this is no problem. When I don't have my ankle band and actually want to drill this hard, I actually make it even harder and crosslock my unbanded ankles together, which both creates drag and binds the legs together so it's even harder to dolphin kick and makes it pretty much impossible to even do minicheat kicks that you can still do with an ankle band.

Still, I lose a lot of speed when I do this, and I feel like I can't pull as hard and as fast as I can when I'm free. I lose about 15sec/100 with the band no matter what.

It's funny - for me, the buoy does NOT make it easier for me to swim. In fact, if I were fatigued, the first thing I would do to keep up my pace in the pool would be to avoid the buoy at all costs!

I hear what Jonnyo is saying, and he's def right about the contrasting sink/float of buoy/band, but I'm actually not using it for practice keeping my legs up (as a band would do very well - I can do that no problem.) I'm using it to really isolate the pull motion and while I'm pulling I really focus hard on keeping my waist and below super still in terms of motion. For me, it's more of a 'eliminate extra motion drill' as opposed to a 'keep the legs up' drill, although for most folks who have problems with the ankle band, it would def be more of a leg lifter as jonnyo suggested.

Good points by all though - I did another session today, and was a hair better with the toys. At the last, it's something that seems to be good for offseason training as I can't overfatigue myself when I mix in these toy-assist sets that invariably reduce my intensity between the hard 25-50-100s that I'm doing right now. (I'm following Matt Dixon's recs right now from his book to work hard in swimming but leave the longer big hammersets for closer to race season, and focus more on quality, recovery and active form right now.)

That's cool. I have novice swimmers do it correctly all the time. And by correctly, I am not trying to eliminate 'minikicks', though I wouldn't refer to them as such. If there are distinct kicks, yeah, that's not the goal. Once we get the awareness focused on keeping the ankles together yet maintaining a supple form, kicking is virtually eliminated, while useful natural undulations remain.

Really?! I honestly seriously doubt that a novice swimmer can successfully do a monokick correctly - if you can monokick correctly, you really HAVE to be able to do a tight ankle band swim correctly, and we know how well that goes for a novice swimmer (they're lucky to survive 10 yards.)

If you banded those novice swimmers tightly, how do they make out?

I think we might have different ideas as to the purpose of drill and activities, and what constitutes "getting it right". At times all swimmers may be confronted by drills or activities that do not come naturally, and whose proper execution eludes them. I caution them not to retard their development by stopping the process until they master a given drill that may be vexing to them. The skills needed by any single drill are echoed in a number of drills and activities, and the keys to mastering one drill may actually lie in moving on to another activity, or by simply stepping back from the activity for a time to allow the subconscious time to ponder and process the activity.


Often times when I am struggling with a particular work problem I will take a short nap, and many times the solution or a means of approaching a solution will manifest itself as I leave the nap. The sequences in my swim programs purposely move from one activity to the next without spending an inordinate amount of time on a single skill, or requiring that you master a certain activity before moving to the next activity. This approach is a purposeful attempt to introduce a particular stimulus and then move on, in effect giving your body-brain time to take a nap in order to ponder its experience, and to formulate a solution to the problem that has been posed to it.


So in regards to novice swimmers and the monoleg pull, yes, they can absolutely do it correctly enough to reap some benefits, while sowing the seeds for further refinement, and without ever experiencing the shrinking awareness that ankle bands can produce.