milesthedog wrote:
Good call. I was kind of thinking of bands and think doing recovery band work could do the trick - I’m already doing bands several times a week, so easy enough.
To the prior poster who said to swim more. Read more.
I agree with you as well that even with a good, well-fitting wetsuit, if you've never swam in it before, you can and likely will encounter some compression issues with the arm recovery motion, esp if you are a low-volume swimmer (like most AG triathletes) that thus don't have as much arm training in that motion. It won't cause you to fail your swim, but it will fatigue you earlier and affect your confidence in the water.
My best race swims are ones where I do at least a minimal amount of legit wetsuit training in the pool before race day - sometimes that's 2 workouts of 3000yds to get acclimated to that extra layer of neoprene.
On a sort of related note, I actually get this same issue for NON-wetsuit swimming in the pool when I go from mostly Vasa swimming to 3000+yd pool swims abruptly while swimming low pool volume per week (<5000) - my pulling main muscles are strong but my arm recovery muscles actually start to fatigue, in a nonessential way, but I can def feel it. I was going to try stretch cords to help it out, but to be honest, it's just 1 or 2 in-pool workouts where I notice this recovery weakness issue, and then it's a total nonissue. I suspect it's the same with the wetsuit recovery motion as above - 1 or 2 'real' sessions and you're probably good to go.