i’m a SUPER SLOW swimmer. my half mile swim time is like 22 minutes. how can i change that? it’s such a mystery to me.
let me break it down further. i can swim my 44 minute per mile pace for hours and not get tired. i mean literally…not be tired. AT ALL. it feels like i’ve been casually walking in the mall for 44 minutes or an hour or whatever. but when i try to go faster, i do it by kicking harder…kicking faster…moving my arms faster. the result? i cut my lap times by miniscule amounts…but i cant even go half a mile because i’ve expended so much energy trying to go LITERALLY seconds faster per 100 yards.
i’ve skimmed stuff like total immersion and tried to get my hydrodynamic…with negligible results.
swimming is not like running! with running…at least i know HOW to go fast. i can lay down a 10 second 100 dash. i can’t keep it up for a mile but i know HOW to go fast. with swimming…i can’t even turn ONE fast lap no matter how much strength and energy i expend. but i can go slow for miles and miles.
what gives? does anyone else have this problem? or did you have this problem in the past? how did you fix it?
First get some lessons. Get a good efficient stroke. Learn how to pull and recover properly.
Once you have those things down it becomes more of a strength building exercize. That means yardage.
My coach in high school once told me something that still rings true.
If you are looking to simply maintain some skill, you need to do it 1-2 times per week.
If you want to get proficient at that skill you need to do it 3 times per week minimum.
If you want to excel it will take 4-7 times per week.
And while some of this does depend on natural talent…gaining efficiency and then putting in 5-6 days a week will go a long way.
Now of course you’ll have to weigh the time required to become a more skilled swimmer against your other goals. But an off season loaded with swimming should help.
As an fyi…almost every coach I know (high school or college) has their workouts and training plans complete for the season. The workouts and weeks are designed, it’s not random. Just like our tri training periodization.
You may want to ask one of them for the workouts. At the high school level the coach should have practices for all levels of swimmer.
When I swim fast, like sprint 50’s or 100’s, I think about pulling harder, not moving my arms faster. If you don’t have proper technique, you won’t be able to pull harder, you arms will just move through the water faster. You need to be able to catch and hold onto the water during the pull. If you can hold the water, then it becomes much more about the strength of your pull and not the speed.
One of the guys I know who can barley swim 1:40’s just learned how to scull the water with his hands. He said the day after spending 10 minutes sculling the water his forearms were killing him. This is after spending 6 months of swimming 3 times a week. In those 6 months, he never properly caught enough water to use his forearms.
I don’t even think about kicking. I have always been the kind of swimmer that just uses my feet for balance and to help with body rotation. Not so effective when you are racing 100’s, but I think it is pretty efficient for tri swims.
I completely agree with the 4-7 times a week notion. I used to hate swimming (Still do a bit) and would swim 2-3 times at most and was piss slow only covering, maybe, 4000 meters. Now that I swim 4-5 times a week I am faster (Still MOP, but not piss slow anymore) and cover 8000-10000 meters a week.
If you don’t swim the yards, you simply are not going to get any fitness, which is a key to swimming.
One of the guys I know who can barley swim 1:40’s just learned how to scull the water with his hands. He said the day after spending 10 minutes sculling the water his forearms were killing him. This is after spending 6 months of swimming 3 times a week. In those 6 months, he never properly caught enough water to use his forearms.
What do you mean by "sculling" the water? I swim 1000 yards at just under a 2:00 pace. My fastest recorded 100s are in the low 1:30s. Been swimming for 11 months now...making consistent progress, but I wonder if that's something I'm missing. Is this something the fist drills is supposed to teach?
If you are a healthy, athletic adult, then you don’t know how to swim. You have zero (0) technique. None. You are getting zippo for propulsion from your upper body. I’m not even sure how you are moving forward; maybe it’s from your legs. The moment you try to actually move water when you try to speed up, you exhaust yourself because you never use those muscles.
You need to find an instructor who will watch you, one on one, from the deck and preferably in the water. I suspect that it will take all of :10 for the instructor to point out 5 things you are doing wrong that will have you, after two weeks of diligently doing the drills he/she recommends, doing a half mile in the pool in 15 minutes.
When I swim fast, like sprint 50’s or 100’s, I think about pulling harder, not moving my arms faster. If you don’t have proper technique, you won’t be able to pull harder, you arms will just move through the water faster. You need to be able to catch and hold onto the water during the pull. If you can hold the water, then it becomes much more about the strength of your pull and not the speed.
One of the guys I know who can barley swim 1:40’s just learned how to scull the water with his hands. He said the day after spending 10 minutes sculling the water his forearms were killing him. This is after spending 6 months of swimming 3 times a week. In those 6 months, he never properly caught enough water to use his forearms.
I don’t even think about kicking. I have always been the kind of swimmer that just uses my feet for balance and to help with body rotation. Not so effective when you are racing 100’s, but I think it is pretty efficient for tri swims.
i need better technique! pull water…scull water…use forearms…
i don’t know what any of that means…but i think i must learn. cuz even when i try to swim fast, i don’t feel no pain in my forearms…
someone teach me!!! someone point me to a swim guru in ann arbor, mi!!!
The biggest thing that helped me with speed is trying to grab as much water with each stroke.
I think that the “Reaching over the Barrel” feeling enabled me to grab more water and do more work on it.
jaretj
can you explain this “reaching over the barrel” feeling in more detail?
This is explained in the Total Immersion material. You may in fact need a coach, but simply buying the TI dvd could be the next best thing. I’m not sure how you absorbed through “skimming”.
Celery…The good news is that you are relaxed in the water…you don’t fight it. This is why you can swim forever and feel like you took a stroll at the mall. That’s a hard thing for many novices to learn.
There is SO much to good technique that I can’t guess what your problems are without a video of you…but the fact that you can increase your turnover dramatically with small changes in speed do seem to suggest at the very least that you don’t have much GRIP on the water. Often when I’m in the middle of a difficult set the water literally feels as thick as mud and it’s hard to find the strength to pull through. Consider that I’ve seen great swimmers make it across a 25meter length of the pool with 12 strokes. That’s over 6 feet of distance from each pull of an arm!
Join a good Masters group if you can. I got much faster when I switched groups. Use the pace clock on every set you do, it is there for a reason, it gives you feedback
