AOS Requesting Guidance

Triathlon Forum
1

46M, new to triathlon and swimming. Will not do my first tri until next summer(a sprint). Only swim background was a one week Y course at summer camp circa 1984. Learned to swim this summer on my own watching videos, reading whatever I could find and keeping track of posts on this site. Took me 3 weeks and I could pretty much swim nonstop, though not at a particularly brisk pace(3:00/100scy at that point). I have determined that I have a lot to learn but I am happy as I have continued to make progress and I am really enjoying swimming. I view my body and my performance sort of like an old car that I am enjoying restoring (my health anyway, never had a swim stroke).

I am now noticing wide variation in my 100y times depending on what I am focusing on. And when it is all in sync, I am probably 20s/100y faster than when it is out of whack at the same kind of effort. So what I am wondering is do all AOS require some kind of instruction or are there some who continue to improve without teaching? I’m thinking lessons are the best path forward, but figured I would ask.

Also, what is the best way to approach taking swim lessons and how can I get the most out of them? I have an opportunity to take some lessons at a Swimlab near me. Over the past four months, I have read a ton of information. But the swim coach undoubtedly knows a lot more about swimming. But I have to do the practicing on my own. So I’m unsure of how often to take a lesson or what practicing should entail to get the most out of it. Currently I’m at 7k/week in 3 or 4 sessions and I have access to a Vasa swim bench. I have not learned flip turns yet.

46M, 5’10"
PB times SCY

25: 16
50: 38
100: 1:28
200: 3:25
400: 7:44
2000: 42:xx(been awhile since I did this, form just breaks down so I swim shorter intervals instead)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

2

Hi there… I’m Also an AOS.

What’s the context of those PB? were those set in the middle of a set? If so what set? … Or are those all out max best single efforts?

What does a typical swim week look like for you?

3x won’t get you very far. It’s probably close to as good as you will get on 3x… Depending on how you answer the above. You’ll need more days in the water per week 4 or 5x.

A swim coach is good. What I do is get a single lesson, every few weeks and work on things in between.

Masters can be good too… Depending on availability and timing in your area. Not an option for me.

Also see this thread.

https://forum.slowtwitch.com/forum/Slowtwitch_Forums_C1/Triathlon_Forum_F1/Swimming_made_simple_P7101368/?page=unread#unread

And the guppy challenge should be starting up pretty soon. That’s a virtual swim group here on ST that follows the swim workouts out out by our esteemed host, slowman.

You can find previous years workouts up in the swimming articles section of the website. I know, right?! Who knew there were articles AND a user discussion forum!! /pink

3

Thanks Tom, for getting back to me.

I do three basic workouts depending on the length of time I have and how I am feeling: 25s on 1:00, 50s on 1:30 and 100s on 2:30. I will tend to throw in 2 or 3 kick sets of 150 yards or so in which I snorkel up, kick with no arms, 11 drill, one arm balance breathe and vertical kick into every workout. Total these workouts may last as short as 30 min or as long as 90 min. Based on my log, I was just shy of 7K per week(6891 scy) in October and November. Length of each workout all depends on work, my family and what is going on at the pool. The reason for my simplicity is a bit silly, but as a new swimmer, I needed more rest in the beginning. Now, I really take the time to think about what I am trying to focus on for that next lap and make sure I swim smoothly. I focus really hard on body position in the beginning of my workouts and spend time on propulsion and kinetic linkage later on in the workout. I have shortened the interval from time to time and can easily do so, but I fail to focus on technical objectives. Also, too many times and distances gets confusing. Round numbers let me watch the pace clock and keep track of my yardage(I need an abacus or something).

All my PBs were in 1600 benchmark sessions that I would do once a month to gauge my progress. 400 warm up, 25 x 4, 50 x 2, 100 x 2, 200 x 2, 400 for time. I’m not sure I’m going to do one this month, I just feel like I am at a point where I might be able to gut out a quicker time, but it is ugly. And I always suffer after pushing it to the limit. And not just physically, but mentally.

There is a masters group near me, but I enjoy time by myself(long story). I can handle a 1 on 1 lesson, but don’t think I’ll enjoy a large group setting. I will check out the thread you mentioned and am looking forward to the video analysis at Swimlabs.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, I see that more yards is likely in my future if I want to keep improving…

4

You are doing well from the times you have posted, relative to your experience and coaching to date.
My advice, as an AOS who started about 6 years ago (CSS now 1:29/100 LCM, HIM 29:40, IM 1:03 etc etc)…
You need regular 1:1 lessons, preferably with video analysis. A typical squad won’t help you progress other than from a fitness perspective, you need someone to constantly be assessing your technique, suggest changes that you go away and work on for a period and then reassess.
Squads are great from a motivational perspective, I can’t do more than 3k on my own in the pool but with the squad 5k flies by.
Technique early on is important, the earlier you can iron out any key deficiencies the quicker your progress will be.
Check out swimsmooth and effortless swimming for some great videos and ideas etc.
Advice I received early on re swimming and progression:
Swim once per week to barely maintain anything, swim twice per week for maintenance, three times a week to improve and then more to speed up the improvements…

5

Thanks Amnesia, you have made real progress and I would love to be able to swim like that. I hate the idea that I found swimming so late in life, but better late than never I guess. I’ve got my video analysis booked for later in the week, should be fun.

Anyways, without discussing it too much, I have had a noncommunicable skin condition my whole life. Makes group activities like Masters very difficult. It is harmless and not infectious, but responses range from people being uncomfortable to outraged. And one thing I’ve learned over the years is there aren’t always people to stand up for you and a doctors note doesn’t count for squat. Human beings make up their minds based on what they see and that’s often that. I swim alone and prefer that to the people not wanting to shake hands or share lanes with me.

A question, did your progress over the last six years come in short periods or gradually? There are days when I feel like I’ve really turned the corner and others where I struggle. Not like that with the bike or the run. The slope of progress may be steeper or flatter, but it never feels like I don’t have a clue. Swimming seems much more volatile. Guess walking did too when I first learned how!

6

Thanks Amnesia, you have made real progress and I would love to be able to swim like that. I hate the idea that I found swimming so late in life, but better late than never I guess. I’ve got my video analysis booked for later in the week, should be fun.

Anyways, without discussing it too much, I have had a noncommunicable skin condition my whole life. Makes group activities like Masters very difficult. It is harmless and not infectious, but responses range from people being uncomfortable to outraged. And one thing I’ve learned over the years is there aren’t always people to stand up for you and a doctors note doesn’t count for squat. Human beings make up their minds based on what they see and that’s often that. I swim alone and prefer that to the people not wanting to shake hands or share lanes with me.

A question, did your progress over the last six years come in short periods or gradually? There are days when I feel like I’ve really turned the corner and others where I struggle. Not like that with the bike or the run. The slope of progress may be steeper or flatter, but it never feels like I don’t have a clue. Swimming seems much more volatile. Guess walking did too when I first learned how!

Thanks for that. I am medical so can imagine some of the potential skin conditions and feel for you, people can be very cruel.
In terms of progress, I think I had a few periods where I rapidly improved and then made minimal/slow progression. Thinking back, at one stage I had a goal to just do 100m in under 1:40…now days have not been slower than that at any stage for the last few years.
I tend to find I respond best when I have a more swim focused block of training and get at least 4 swims in a week. Then I tend to sit back in more of a maintenance mode. My work is such that some weeks I can only get to the pool a couple of times. A few years back I did a 19.7k open water event with another person in a duo, so that involved pretty serious training for 4 months. I don’t think I got a lot faster in that period but did develop a whole lot of muscle memory. I just wished I had more video work done prior to that as making changes gets harder the longer you have had a bad habit for!
You can post videos here on ST and get advice as well, I am a bit too shy to do that though! Trouble is, self coaching is fine but you really do not know what you look like until you see it on video, even now I still get surprised at how certain things look for me in the water despite consciously trying and thinking I have eliminated something from my stroke!
Those times you are posting show you have made good progress from when you have started. Just remember they are short course and in yards, so won’t always translate as well to the open water (which can be unpredictable-I swim in our fast lane in our squad and a chap who is quite a bit slower in the pool out swam me in IM last weekend, just because his style etc suit him having a wetsuit and it really assists him!)/

7

Thanks for all your feedback. I really appreciate hearing about your experience improving your swim, gives me hope as an AOS.

8

Good to see you have kick in that practice menu.

How are you with a kickboard, no snorkel?

9

Anyways, without discussing it too much, I have had a noncommunicable skin condition my whole life. Makes group activities like Masters very difficult. It is harmless and not infectious, but responses range from people being uncomfortable to outraged. And one thing I’ve learned over the years is there aren’t always people to stand up for you and a doctors note doesn’t count for squat. Human beings make up their minds based on what they see and that’s often that. I swim alone and prefer that to the people not wanting to shake hands or share lanes with me.

I swim with women who cover up a lot. One in my tri club has long sleeves, tights to her knees and a skirt, for religious reasons; another at my gym wears coverage to her elbows and to above knee (no skirt). I’ve also seen guys in long sleeve compression tops.

Just wanted to share that in the event it offers options for you.

I have been swimming on some ocassions when I’ve forgotten my suit and made do (due?) with other workout clothing. My advice should you want to give this a try is to aim for thin snug baselayer stuff as I found anything slightly loose to feel distracting and / or like it might fall off (I nearly provided a below the waist peep show when doing a vigorous push off from the wall after a flip turn the day I swam in my running skort).

10

Good to see you have kick in that practice menu.

How are you with a kickboard, no snorkel?

I’m curious why you ask the OP this question.
I do my kick sets this way too, because it both allows me to breathe better and avoids hurting my lower back. Not worrying about those 2 things allow me to focus on how the kicking feels. One specific thing, the upward bend in my back when using a kick board leads to excentuated downward kicking and zero focus on the upward pull of my leg back, but with a snorkel I can balance that or just focus on the upward pull. Lately I’ve found the upward (or backward when I’m on my side) portion of the kick both adds stability when I swim without the snorkel, and also adds strength to my pulling arm when I transition to the catch.

I can concentrate better with the snorkel since getting air isn’t a problem, but feel very self conscious about using it at master’s. At some master’s sessions I felt panic b/c the water is extra choppy, the group or instructor is hard core about holding an interval, and I struggle to feel calm and like I can get enough air in the chaos. It is good for training my mind for open water race swimming, but not good for me to feel like I’m getting any form practice at all. I guess I just can’t concentrate on that stuff when I’m feel like I’m being water boarded. But I didn’t have the nerve to swim master’s with a snorkel.

(ps, I use a Power Breather. It’s far better for getting air vs the single tube snorkel variety I’d tried).

11

Kickboard position is a diagnostic on how well your upper spine is able to drop your chest into the water.

Important for drag reduction, stroke mechanics and of course speed.

Gym 2x week for 2 years i can now use a kickboard “normally”. Also putting down my fastest times with very little pool time. All posture

12

Good to see you have kick in that practice menu.

How are you with a kickboard, no snorkel?

I have never used a kickboard! I read somewhere that they were bad for swimming and that I should learn to float and kick without one…but I’m open to suggestions.

13

Thanks Tsunami. I’ve lost faith over the years in folks, but since you are a fellow TOOL fan, I’ll consider the advice.

14

What is this Power Breather of which you speak and why is it every time I visit this site, I end up spending more money…

15

Kickboard position is a diagnostic on how well your upper spine is able to drop your chest into the water.

Important for drag reduction, stroke mechanics and of course speed.

Gym 2x week for 2 years i can now use a kickboard “normally”. Also putting down my fastest times with very little pool time. All posture

This is very interesting and I’m going to keep this in mind. Postural stability is one of the hardest things for me to maintain.

16

My swimming has been on my mind a lot over the past week or so, that’s why I posted this thread. So I had an hour in the pool today by myself and I decided to try to narrow down where the problem was. I was doing 50s on 1:30 and later 25s on 1:00 in a diagnostic effort. All SCY. In between I spent 10 minutes doing kick sets, floating, vertical kicking and streamlining. My kicking is not good. Vertical kicking I can do and kicking on my side doing balanced breathing is slightly propulsive, but laying flat on the water, my kick is quite nonpropulsive.

Times for 25s ranged from 19-28. For 50s 46-57. But the decline was not linear with time. It seemed to be affected by what I was focused on.

Every time I take off I try to focus on one idea. The things that yielded the fastest swim times regardless of fatigue were:

Thinking about staying erect (yes I said this to myself as it is easy to remember) in my posture
Using a pull buoy (which I usually do with paddles, but for some reason didn’t today)
Wearing floaty pants

Things that didn’t help me go faster or may have slowed me down:

Trying to link my kick to the catch of the opposite hand
Trying to control body rotation
Trying to breathe bilaterally
Trying to reach over a barrel to achieve EVF

I am scheduled later in the week for video analysis and look forward to the findings. Part of me feels like just focusing on streamline/tautness/erect posture for a month or two. Stick to swimming 25s and progressively lower the rest period to 15s until I can maintain the pace I want on that interval. Then repeat this with 50s, increasing to 100s and onward from there. If I only focus on one idea, all I have to do is figure out how to count laps without the clock.

Fortunately, I felt like my effort on the faster times was the same as the slower ones and I still stick to the cadence from my Tempo Trainer(60spm). However, I can’t maintain 1:16/100y pace for even 50 right now and swim clean, my form just breaks down. So I’ve got some work ahead of me. I do feel more hopeful that with some instruction, increased volume(to improve fitness and stroke rate), and some persistence, I can continue to make improvements. We’ll see I guess. I’ll let you all know what I find out after the video session.

Thanks to everyone for your advice.

17

Every time I take off I try to focus on one idea. The things that yielded the fastest swim times regardless of fatigue were:

Thinking about staying erect (yes I said this to myself as it is easy to remember) in my posture
Using a pull buoy (which I usually do with paddles, but for some reason didn’t today)
Wearing floaty pants

Things that didn’t help me go faster or may have slowed me down:

Trying to link my kick to the catch of the opposite hand
Trying to control body rotation
Trying to breathe bilaterally
Trying to reach over a barrel to achieve EVF

All signs that body position is probably your primary limiter. Get that video done. Those other things may come into play once you can hold you body position at the same time. One thing at a time.

18

All signs that body position is probably your primary limiter. Get that video done. Those other things may come into play once you can hold you body position at the same time. One thing at a time.

Will do. Thanks Tom.

19

What is this Power Breather of which you speak and why is it every time I visit this site, I end up spending more money…

Ha! I’ve never been granted credibility before based on my music choices!! (PS, saw Tool in Philly last month and the show was awesome!)

If you’ve been to the Power Breather site, you’ll have read a better explanation than I can provide. But I am a real person who feels the air is easier to breathe through it (the Power Breather) vs through a standard snorkel when swimming hard or long intervals. In the beginning, it was unusual to exhale through the one way membrane (at the bottom), which provided a bit more resistance while under water than either an open snorkel tube or breathing with no snorkel. But when breathing harder b/c I am swimming firmly, I don’t notice this resistance at all. I also don’t notice any resistance to breathing in (through the set of one way valves at the top). At any rate, there are two tubes, not one, and the air moves in one direction - in through the top, out through the bottom, so the tubes don’t get clogged up with “dirty air”, aka a build up of CO2 from exhaling that doesn’t get well-exchanged with fresh air in a normal snorkel.

I hope you get a lot out of your video session. I never did. For some reason, the words people use to describe swimming do not mean the same to me as they must to others, and the video didn’t make it clear to me either. When I focused on “hand over a barrel” I found my stroke was shorter. People in one master’s group I used to attend would say “high elbows are the key to speed”. OK, well apparently high elbows doesn’t mean elbows are high, instead referring to elbow being over the wrist so forearm is forming a deep paddle - ie hands are deep. How “high elbows” actually means “deep hands”, I’ll never understand. But ok, now that I understand that the cues are spoken in some alternate version of English that I should not take literally, maybe I’ll get more out of them in the future - hopefully.

Another thing I’ve been told is to try to stretch out and be long in the water. This leads to me over-gliding. But just recently I’ve tried thinking about getting narrower in the water - pulling shoulder blades together, keeping my shoulders down versus up around my ears - that was when I started to feel a connection with the back-pulling phase of the kick and my pulling arm.

Anyway, good luck!

20

My swimming has been on my mind a lot over the past week or so, that’s why I posted this thread. So I had an hour in the pool today by myself and I decided to try to narrow down where the problem was. I was doing 50s on 1:30 and later 25s on 1:00 in a diagnostic effort. All SCY. In between I spent 10 minutes doing kick sets, floating, vertical kicking and streamlining. My kicking is not good. Vertical kicking I can do and kicking on my side doing balanced breathing is slightly propulsive, but laying flat on the water, my kick is quite nonpropulsive.

Times for 25s ranged from 19-28. For 50s 46-57. But the decline was not linear with time. It seemed to be affected by what I was focused on.

I’m also a frustrated AOS with time similar to yours as well, and in this year since April I couldn’t really take my mind off swimming except for the one or two months when it was too hot to swim.

Every time I take off I try to focus on one idea. The things that yielded the fastest swim times regardless of fatigue were:

Thinking about staying erect (yes I said this to myself as it is easy to remember) in my posture
Using a pull buoy (which I usually do with paddles, but for some reason didn’t today)
Wearing floaty pants

Staying erect helps me a LOT, but when fatigue sets in my form starts to break.
Using a pull bouy makes me slower by about 2 seconds per 100 as experimented in an earlier training session, taking average times changing with various gears.
I don’t have any floaty pants so I can’t experiment with that.

Things that didn’t help me go faster or may have slowed me down:

Trying to link my kick to the catch of the opposite hand
Trying to control body rotation
Trying to breathe bilaterally
Trying to reach over a barrel to achieve EVF

For the first item, I previously didn’t know how to kick properly as well, but the coach taught me in a lesson that, in the 2-beat kick, the down-kick should be at the same time as the pull of the same hand to amplify the propulsive effect, which immediately made me faster.
Trying to breathe bilaterally didn’t help me and I’m now used to breathe on the right side most of the time (about 99%), only switching side when my neck is tired, when recovering actively or when I am looking someone / something to the left.
Trying to control body rotation or reach over a barrel might or might not have helped - it certainly didn’t help me go faster for a short distance but it might help to retain efficiency over a long distance.

I am scheduled later in the week for video analysis and look forward to the findings. Part of me feels like just focusing on streamline/tautness/erect posture for a month or two. Stick to swimming 25s and progressively lower the rest period to 15s until I can maintain the pace I want on that interval. Then repeat this with 50s, increasing to 100s and onward from there. If I only focus on one idea, all I have to do is figure out how to count laps without the clock.

Fortunately, I felt like my effort on the faster times was the same as the slower ones and I still stick to the cadence from my Tempo Trainer(60spm). However, I can’t maintain 1:16/100y pace for even 50 right now and swim clean, my form just breaks down. So I’ve got some work ahead of me. I do feel more hopeful that with some instruction, increased volume(to improve fitness and stroke rate), and some persistence, I can continue to make improvements. We’ll see I guess. I’ll let you all know what I find out after the video session.

Thanks to everyone for your advice.

I did a video analysis in Feb and some instruction afterwards but it didn’t help my speed, only my efficiency that, before the instructions I was getting tired at about 3 km and afterwards I eventually could go marathon distance. However, it seems that I’m now having improvement from November onward after my lesson in October in conjunction with the reduced temperature allowing increased intensity. My form doesn’t break down as much when it is cool enough.