just got back in the water last week, and found that the only way to get through some of the distance is to do choice stroke (generally breast, when i’m stronger a little fly as well). so a 500 is broken down to=200 free, 100 breast, 200 free.
is it beneficial to swim other strokes within a swim workout?
why or why don’t you do it?
how much does a pull bouy mimick a wetsuit?
(generally i hardly use the buoy, but now i have a sleeveless wetsuit…wondering if i should use it more?)
kc
Other strokes, yes and no. There are beneficial things about the other strokes but it is hard to come up with the math that shows that for any given number of minutes, you are better off swimming other strokes.
In reality though, many times you do other strokes for a little variety. So in that regard as long as it keeps you in the pool more, and more pool is what you need then it is good. I do other strokes more in the off season or on a summer day when my wife is lounging at the side of the pool with my daughter and I have plenty of time to spend in the water.
A pull buoy mimics the position of the wetsuit reasonably well but not the kick. This will come into play in rough swims where the waves throw you off of your rhythm and a well timed integrated kick is important to keep your stroke somewhat intact. If you do your open water swims in flat water then it is pretty much the same.
Swimming different strokes is nice to break up the monotony of the time in the water. Backstroke can be nice between other sets to loosen you up, breaststroke can give you a better feel for the water, but may bother your knees and butterfly builds up your swimming strength. Plus, if you do IM repeats, swimming fly, then the other strokes can mimic what happens during open water swims, when you sprint from time to time to get onto some faster feet or after from traffic at the start and then need to recover from that effort while still swimming along at a reasonably quick pace.
BUT, if you can’t swim 500 yards without breaking things up, then you do need to work on that. Both because you will need to swim more than that in a race and because if you don’t have the mental toughness to swim more than 500 yards without changing strokes, you are going to have a lot of trouble in a race.
well, i’ve got only 3 swims under my belt right now. i’ll be able to do a decent 500 free by the end of this week. swimming comes together quickly with consistency. A decent 1000+ by the end of the month.
the IM swim is good insight, i’m going to work a 400 IM into my swim today, but at this point will probably have to do the fly in a full stroke, one arm, one arm, full stroke style until i get stronger. this is a good warm-up set IMO.
It takes some time to get back in shape. When I started swimming again two years ago, it was harder to swim 300 yards without stopping than it had been to swim 10,000 yards without stopping in college even though I had finished a number of marathons in the five years before starting to swim again.
yeah, tell me about it. my first day back i did 100’s on 2 minutes with a friend, was coming in on 1:40 or 1:50 and nearly suffocating, lol! it sucked and boy was i sore.
it comes together soon enough though, with consistency and hard work. dreaming up improvement won’t help, it’s all about doing it. rats.
i think it can be helpful to mix up strokes if you are getting back to the routine and are trying to build back your stamina, since you can mix up muscle groups as they fatigue. but overall to get faster and best manage your time, you should do primarily freestyle. imo specificity of training is important - swimming a lot of breastroke will certainly make you a better breastroker, but won’t help your freestyle as much than if you were doing primarily freestyle. just keep at it, after the first couple of weeks getting back, it should start getting easier as you adjust to swimming after an extended layoff.
i’d punt on the buoy and focus more on getting your swim technique down, getting a good rotation of the body during the stroke, keeping a high elbow position, and keeping the hips riding high in the water. if you can swim fine without a wetsuit, then you don’t need to worry about swimming with a wetsuit.
My workouts are always free (which is technically a ‘free choice’ of strokes), but tomorrow’s workout i actually have a 200 of non-freestyle. I am perplexed! Once upon a time I was an IMer (not Ironman, individual medley), but those strokes are rusty! I used to hate all-freestyle workouts in high school, but now I am afraid of embarrassing myself with anything other than free!
The benefits of swimming with other strokes includes better feel for the water, having the ability to feel when you are pulling and when you are slipping through the water, increased fatigue resistance & increased kicking prowness.
embarrassing yourself?
it comes back quick, just like riding a bike, you don’t forget.
i know how you feel though, i suck BAD at kick sets. on the sets everybody will be done while i’ll still have 15 meters to go. it’s always been that way for some reason. ce la vie.
A few years back a top local and national masters open water specialist, Alex Kostich, would pop into our 50 m pool every once and a while. He’d swim for an hour straight and more. Compared to me, his was at a very fast pace. If I were swimming long distance sets he’d pass me every 800 meters. As I recall he would break up his swim at about the 600 meter mark with a 200 IM and just keep on going. I am sure he was able to go about 5 grand in an hour all the while adding a 200 IM every 600 meters.
I guess the 200 IM’s made him stronger and broke the sameness of swimmng freestyle straight for an hour. Inserting a powerful 50 meter fly in the middle of your swim would certainly raise the effort level another notch.
Just do your all your whole workouts fly with a half lap underwater (in the big pool) and you won’t ever have any problems with those sissy 2.4 mile Ironman swims anymore. Sometimes I used to roll over and backstroke a min or so in races to navigate and look for course marks/ sighting for the return leg. You have to be in pretty clear water so a mop won’t work out as well. I always thought butterflyers in tri races were just showing off, except in the shallows at the end or start…