i m not sure i understand your question?

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Jonathan Caron / Professional Coach / ironman champions / age group world champions
Jonnyo Coaching
Instargram

Rhythm first and then relax works on the bike as well. Did it today and had a great ride because of it. If you change range to technique in general, then you can apply it to all three sports.

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Zen and the Art of Triathlon. Strava Workout Log
Interviews with Chris McCormack, Helle Frederikson, Angela Naeth, and many more.
http://www.zentriathlon.com

That's exactly what I understood as well; and it applies to me; It is so hard to fix the mechanization I learned with Total Immersion.

No. If you work on rhythm and being relaxed, you can get in the volume and turnover for the other stuff to start fixing itself. People that swim by technique first swim like they are swimming while trying to read a car manual while driving at the same time.

Rhythm and relaxed gives sustainable speed. A body in water that has sustainable speed has different physics than a slow one. It's like how a rudder on a boat doesn't work unless the boat is going fast enough. It stays up better, the water feels different. In that environment, you get better feedback on what to do and what not to do and learn quickly how to keep getting faster and faster.

You want turnover to create speed. Focusing on technique slows down turnover by time taking to overthink. Turnover without being relaxed kills turnover by burnout. Do the first two Rs and everything else starts coming together on it's own.

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Zen and the Art of Triathlon. Strava Workout Log
Interviews with Chris McCormack, Helle Frederikson, Angela Naeth, and many more.
http://www.zentriathlon.com

for the past three months I've had a coach who is an international level open water swimmer try to get me to unlearn the TI that I have ingrained in my stroke over the past decade. Not that TI didn't helped me but it certainly puts up a wall that stops any further improvement. After 2 sessions a week of one-on-one, the TI has gone and has been replaced... hopefully for the better

our work has a youtube block on our servers so I look forward to seeing the video this evening.

I am slowly circling in on this idea!! I have spent ~3yrs focussing entirely on technique, side kicking, Unco, Popov, catch drills etc etc. Never really got any faster. I went for some video analysis with a successful coach and had all these questions lined up about elbow angle and timing my rotation with my catch, and when to angle down my hand, and on and on. What she basically said to me was that I needed to stroke faster and improve my swim fitness!! And biliateral breathe more often to balance out my stroke.

Hard pill to swallow, being told that your issue is fitness when you can run 17 for 10k. I think we would all like to think that we are fit enough and that our problem is purely a technical one, and one day we will figure out the thing we are doing wrong and voila!! But what is gradually dawning on me is that I don't have swim fitness.

Going to be concentrating on turnover, rhythm and relaxation. A timely post for me.

Well, ummm, ya, there is a huge diff between run fitness and swim fitness. IME, a reasonably lean swimmer with some run aptitude can pick up running pretty quickly, but the runner has to work quite a bit to get the upper body swim-specific muscular strength and endurance to swim well. But, at least it sounds like you are on the right track now. I think you can really sum it up in "swim with a relaxed rhythm with whatever turnover rate is relaxed and comfortable for you", i.e. a guy who's 6'4" will likely have a slower turnover than a 5'2" girl.

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I think there's a lot of truth in what Sutton preaches often, which is 'think less, train and suffer more' in swimming. I for sure was hit by paralysis by analysis in swimming, and am just starting to commit to swim suffering for improvement.

I also have had essentially zero improvement from analyzing my stroke and making small changes once I was past 1:50/100, and all my improvements from the hard stuff. Doesn't mean I'm neglecting mechanics, but I'm not spending the bulk of my time avoiding swimming hard just to swim 'right' anymore.

Basically, the third R seems to be an extension of the first two, if your range is uncomfortable then you will not have relaxation and your swimming is unsustainable. I for instance am told I have a decent swim stroke but after a few hundred yards, I'm very gassed. From what I can tell in his video, he is telling at least one person to stop worrying about DPS and do something that is actually sustainable swimming.

If extending your arm is hurting you (and I know in your video you downplayed it with the direction of keep your elbow out and start your catch quickly) then is that something that a coach will bring back slowly? For instance, the good swimmers that I would one day like to emulate do have good arm extension and very nice DPS.

i think your first paragraph is very true. Get something sustainable...work on relaxing and having good rhythm and DPS is the last of your worry. You can become a very fast swimmer (18min/1500m) with short stroke but high turnover. So it s not essential and not sure you should try to emulate this either..

I personally never was able to sustain a long stroke but as Brett show, i was a perfect candidate for high cadence and that would get me in the 48min ironman group. I dont have a swimmer stroke...but i got fit, relax, and turn quickly!

like brett, i do not worry about long stroke until much later in development of most swimmers. I want a proper catch... but it doesn't have to be long, not for triathlon anyway.

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Jonathan Caron / Professional Coach / ironman champions / age group world champions
Jonnyo Coaching
Instargram

You stole my thunder, I was just about to make a snarky comment on swimming tips for training with 14 year old girls.

"Comments are disabled for this video". Can't understand that at all. How on earth can we thank him
for this help if we can't comment on his video?

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Find out what it is in life that you don't do well, then don't
do that thing.

Well, if you can keep your good form right now for say 300 m, that just means you lack the swim-specific endurance to hold your stroke for 1500 m or longer. All you really need to do is swim more to develop your swimming endurance. Also, if you feel that a long stroke with very nice DPS would work for you, it's never too soon to start trying to emulate those swimmers whose strokes you admire. I did this myself years ago when my stroke was still in its "formative stages". As Sutton says, swim strokes are very individualistic and fast swimmers come in almost all shapes and sizes with many diff stroke rates:)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

This is EXACTLY me. This is only my 3rd season and I have been stuck on 1:50 p/100 in races with minimal improvement from stroke mechanic changes. It's been frustrating as I am seeing significant gains on the bike, and then maintaining my run fitness (originally started out as a runner). I have thought for a long time it's been my mechanics... I am going to try swimming faster, and quit worrying about the exact way my hand enters the water and if my elbow is perfectly in position, etc.

So, just out of sheer curiosity, where do so many people get the idea that the exact hand angle, etc, are so important??? Is this part of the Total Immersion influence??? I had never heard such discussions until I got on ST about 2.5 yrs ago and, if you spend any time watching fast swimmers swim fast, not just warming up but swimming hard, it's pretty clear that almost all of them are throwing their arms over the water and pulling as hard and fast as they can, with very little regard for their "exact hand angle":)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I was lectured on my hand/arm positioning and high elbow at master swim, which is where I began swimming. I was also told to stretch out my stroke and reach as far as I could when i enter the water. Now from what I am seeing, I really shouldn't do any of that, and instead focus on being comfortable and turning over more often.

I think the middle ground is best, i.e. stretch out as far as you can comfortably, and then turn over as fast as you can while pulling all the way through your stroke. If you are pulling properly, you should be able to feel the water rushing down your thigh to your knee all the way to your upper shins. Assuming you have some good swimmers at your pool, just watch them and try to do what they do. Pick out the one with the stroke you like the best, the person with the stroke you would most like to emulate:)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

White men can't dance cause they don't have rhythm, pretty funny. Probably great advice in the video, but he comes off really intimidating.

I know you were not directing towards me, but I see SO much of this specifically in the triathlon ranks. I'm a huge fan of mastering basic technical issues like balance, kick coordination and breathing skills, but there are a million ways to skin the cat of catch and pull. Technical honing will get some people this far>>>>>>, the next swimmer this far>>>, but at some point everyone has to be willing to do the good old swim sets that just work. There are so many spokes to the wheel that may get any given swimmer to their threshold for substantial gains with technical focus, but fitness has to take over the bulk of the work at some point. My coach took me off the big doses of technique work around 1:25ish scy pace, after that is was go until your eyes pop out. I'm not saying I don't still find little tweakages that make me marginally faster b/c there is always a new feel around the corner simply b/c the faster we go the more different the water feels. But the past 3 years I'd say 95% of my gains came from swimming til my toenails hurt.

He's Australian. If life were a video game, Australia would be the last level.

Ya, it is amazingly common to see this, which is why i ask why. Maybe it is TI influence, or maybe these guys are watching good swimmers when they are swimming very easy and trying to imitate that easy style. What they may not realize is that as the good swimmer starts to speed up, his/her turnover increases and usually it doesn't look quite so easy anymore. A few swimmers can swim sub-1:00 per 100 yd and look like they are not even trying, but that is only because they've done literally millions of yards to get to that point.

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

I am going to alter my approach to swim wkouts because of good advice on this thread, but just to clarify, aren't you a single-sort athlete? My apologies if I'm misremembering anothe post of yours on another thread . . .

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What are you people, on dope?

—Mr. Hand

Yup you have the right! I bagged it after 23-24 years of on and off again with horrible knee problems. Not to mention getting rear ended by a drunk driver and lingering back issues post surgery. Injured....to back to cycling....back and forth. Just tired of it being hurt all the time. I swam like a douche bag in my triathlon days really b/c of laziness. I had heard the right things from time to time, but I always made some excuse as to why I didn't have the need or the time to address some basic skills. It wasn't until I went full swim focus that I did it. Took me a solid 6 months to nail those things down so they were on auto pilot. Triathlon wold have been so much more fun had I done that decades ago.

At least in my eyes there really isn't any difference in the need for these skills whether one is a single sport pool swimmer, triathlete only or an open water fiend. If a swimmer will get a reign on their balance, coordinate some kind of kick and get their breathing done in time so as not to disrupt rhythm they can really have a lot of fun in the water. Until then it just sucks. Odd as it may seem once you get to that point and you look at the workout for the day it looks much less daunting that it used to b/c you are not fighting the water so much. Sure, it still hurts, but mentally it's so much more doable.

I swam like a douche bag in my triathlon days really b/c of laziness. I had heard the right things from time to time, but I always made some excuse as to why I didn't have the need or the time to address some basic skills. It wasn't until I went full swim focus that I did it. Took me a solid 6 months to nail those things down so they were on auto pilot. Triathlon would have been so much more fun had I done that decades ago. (ANY TRIATHLETE COULD DO THIS WITH A 6-MONTH WINTER SWIM FOCUS.)
At least in my eyes there really isn't any difference in the need for these skills whether one is a single sport pool swimmer, triathlete only or an open water fiend. If a swimmer will get a rein on their balance, coordinate some kind of kick and get their breathing done in time so as not to disrupt rhythm they can really have a lot of fun in the water. Until then it just sucks. Odd as it may seem once you get to that point and you look at the workout for the day it looks much less daunting that it used to b/c you are not fighting the water so much. Sure, it still hurts, but mentally it's so much more doable.

This bolded section needs to be memorialized somewhere on ST, as part of a summary of how to learn to swim properly. (I added the ALL CAPS sentence, just for emphasis:)

One other comment: you always emphasize how much swimming hurts; certainly, I have felt this also but I would say that it is much more fun to swim fast than to swim slowly, and for me, when I'm swimming really well, I get such a feeling of power that is so fine and really so addictive, that I don't think of it as painful at all. This is why I've gone back to mainly swimming, because I've never gotten this same feeling on a regular basis on the B or R; occasionally yes but not almost every day as in the pool:)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."