Hey all,
General swim question. Mainly aimed at kids but I think it applies to all.
Should you ever swim a set/work-out where you get fatigued enough that your form deteriorates?
I think at that time - you should stop and recover. Swimming with poor form is counter-productive.
Agree or disagree?
Dave
If my form deteriorates, I stop a set/workout and do drills for the remaining planned yardage. I swim 2min/100 though so I need to focus on good technique and form more than anything.
I think it depends.
I had a college swim coach once tell me that it was really exciting for a group of coaches at a conference to see a swimmer to 2 perfect consecutive strokes. I’m not kidding, 2 strokes.
So, what do you mean by deterioration? some deterioration is inevitable, happens every length. Thats exactly the point where you need to spend the most effort trying to maintain form AND speed. The purpose of some swim sets is to arrive at exactly this place by the end of the set, where you really have to fight to control form when you feel like throwing up.
Letting it totally fall apart is pointless but moderately sloppy the last third to quarter of a workout isn’t a bad thing. Would you buy a bike that’s never been stressed-tested during the development process?
Same goes for swimming. Understand how it feels like when things start to go awry and understand how to then do a patch job and hold it together when it does.
As the the suggestion that you should get out when it goes down hill, every coach I had over the years would have told me to not come back to the pool until my attitude improved if I tried to pull that.
Dan wrote about this a while back:
http://www.slowtwitch.com/mainheadings/coachcorn/costofform.html
“So, back to the question. Do you swim only what you can while holding good form? Or do you swim the proscribed yardage, even if your technique falters? Any triathlete, and any triathlon coach, and any single sport coach, has experienced these quandaries, and heard the accompanying questions from his or her disciples. The answer in practice is, you do everything. You swim with proper technique. And you swim the proscribed yardage, even if you can’t do it with proper technique. And you swim it as fast as you conceivably can. You do all this even if you can’t really do any of it perfectly. Eventually things work themselves out.”
I think it depends.
That’s about what I do. I’ll continue to try and make (or increase) the interval and focus hard on holding form. Once I can’t do that any longer, I’ll switch over to some drills that focus on where I’m hurting then finish up with some short, hard intervals
I think it depends on how much time you have before your event and how long the event is. If you are only doing sprints or olympics you can probably focus almost exclusively on your form with very little “fatigued swimming” and still build enough endurnace for those distances. But the closer you get to the event OR the greater the distance of the event the more you will also need swim specific endurance. At some point you have to accept that the form you have is what you will race with and you need to build enough strength and endurance with that form for your race distance. Note, I’m not a swim expert but that just seems like common sense.
If my form deteriorates, I stop a set/workout and do drills
I swim 2min/100 though
You will continue to swim 2min/100 if you stop workouts to do drills.
Get those arms tired while swimming.
Interesting, that flies in the face of what Total Immersion advocates. They make the point that if you continue to swim with bad form (which I am, as evidenced by my times) you will only teach yourself to continue swimming poorly. I think I will side with TI on this one.
I took weekly lessons from a TI instructor for several months. During form drills the instructor did say that I should stop if my form broke down. BUT we would always finish the session off with an endurance swim and we didn’t stop if the form broke down. What my coach did advocate was going to the backstroke for a breather if I felt myself getting too sloppy. Swimming might be 90% form but at some point good form with no endurance isn’t going to get you very far in a race, especially a long one.
I’m not sure why an olympic-distance tri is so different from a 70.3 in terms of endurance needed.
What my coach used to tell me was that every swim workout was also a swim practice: that I should always be thinking about my form. This either/or stuff doesn’t make much sense to me.
THis sounds sensible to me.
I agree with respect to hard, race-type sets. But you can always go slow. It’s not often that you reach absolute failure and it’s not that hard to keep proper form, even after 20k yards in a day.
Interesting, that flies in the face of what Total Immersion advocates. They make the point that if you continue to swim with bad form (which I am, as evidenced by my times) you will only teach yourself to continue swimming poorly. I think I will side with TI on this one.
Total Immersion is about making you efficient and comfortable while swimming. TI is not about going fast. Pushing yourself until and beyond the point where your technique crumbles makes you faster and gives you more endurance.
The reason it’s called swim practice is because every stroke should be practice. If you drop your elbow on one pull, make sure you keep that elbow high on the next pull.
Total Immersion is about making you efficient and comfortable while swimming. TI is not about going fast.
Oh jeez. Did you really want to go and start this debate? 
I guess it is nice to have a swimming thread instead of 25 threads on Lance, doping or why Cervelo should build the next space shuttle. I’ll bit though and defent the TI approach. The TI people believe that MOST triathletes should focus on conserving energy on the swim. Therefore they advocate efficiency in the water first and foremost. The believe that if you get the form right that you will expend much less energy to get through the swim than someone with worse form who swims harder. This is common sense.
TI swimming doesn’t have to be slow but it is about being balanced in the water and letting your momentum do as much work as possible up to a point. What you will often find (as I did when my coach timed a few efforts) is that you tend to lose less speed than you think. Once you have the form you add speed. Really the TI method isn’t that different from other swim instruction. The primary difference (and where the notion that TI is slower) is that TI is about energy conservation since you also need to bike and run after the swim. Unless you are in that top 1% they believe that your over all tri time will improve with this approach.
You can side with TI, but all those people who put in the hard yards are going to beat you out of the water on race day.
You didn’t seem to disagree with what I said.
Not a disagreement but I think you have to quantify slow. They say “smooth” not slow and if you ever see some of their instructors swim I doubt you would call them slow. Their approach might not look fast but over the course of a long distance event it might be. I think of TI more like pacing. Just as in the bike and run, if you burn too many matches early (to borrow a oft repeated phrase from Coggan/Hunter) you will pay for it later. TI is about smooth, steady pacing from point A to B. Of course, race tactics will come into play which might change your pacing strategy so you still need to know when and where to pick it up.
TI is completely irrelevant to open water triathlon swimming.
Search “TI”, username “ironguide”