To much too soon!

Triathlon Forum
1

I recently joined a new swim team and was thrown in with people who were twice as fast as me. I’m a fairly new swimmer and I started off having to keep up, hence, I never warmed up, got so exhaused after I felt like I needed to pass out. It was the most horrid experience ever!
Is there anything dangerous about not giving yourself an adequate warm-up and pushing yourself to anaerobic levels so soon for so long when you’re not use to it?
Would it be more wise for me to get private coaching rather than swim with a team without direction and just effort.
Again, I’m new to triathlons and am only starting with the sprint and olympic size one’s but would sure appreciate some help.

Tinker

2

You know you don’t have to keep up with the fishes. Push yourself while you’re there certainly, but trying to swim way beyond your ability has some obvious pitfalls. That said, if you survive and thrive in the long term, then you will be golden. Unfortunately there’s no way to know ahead of time whether you will sink or swim…

Another option is to swim solo/coached most of the time, then jump in with the Masters once in a while and bust your balls. That ought to keep things fresh.

3

You just need to find your stroke - you have to learn the technique :slight_smile:

Stay with the team, but find yourself a different lane. That way, you can swim at your own speed, but also have the benefit of good swimmers, and hopefully a coach, around to help you. Watch the good swimmers and how they shape their strokes, and ask them to watch your stroke and find the flaws (for instance, a lot of beginning swimmers ‘cross over’ their arms - that means reaching over the midline of your body when your arm is entering the water). You can do the same workouts, though you’ll probably have to adjust your intervals (if the fast lane does their 5 x 100 set on 1:15 you might do it on 1:30).

Search for “The Swimming Drill Thread” - fishtwitch has thrown a lot of good stuff in there :slight_smile: swim drills help work on specific parts of your stroke. For example, Fingertip Drag forces you to recover with a high elbow. You really just need to get a feel for the water, and how to breathe. But once you get it, it is the best thing in the world. You dive in and just melt.

Keep at it, swimming rocks.
love from,
a swimmer who slept in and missed swim practice this morning :stuck_out_tongue:

4
  1. Don’t give up
  2. Like anything in triathlon, there are some things you can occasionally tweak to make some significant steps forward, but for the most part, it’s down to putting the hours of training in. So you probably need to find some extra hours in the pool on your own and build up some distance, endurance and aerobic capacity.
  3. Have a qualified person check out your technique to make sure that there is nothing major wrong. You can fine tune as you get better, but get some of the basics in place first. These following three things have helped me tremendously.
    a) Breath every 3 strokes i.e. on alternate sides (always) so you develop in a symmetrical and balanced manner.
    b) check your arm/hand entry and arm/hand position under the water
    c) focus on keeping your torso as straight as possible, keep the twisting and turning to a minimum
  4. If the program will allow, try and just do the program at your own speed and forget trying to hang with the elites of the club.
  5. I’m not sure how dangerous it is for you to be pushing yourself to the max as you describe. Check with your physician for that. At some point your improvement will make this less painful, however I’m sure its very discouraging for a total beginer and might could cause a lot of demotivation before you begin to see the fruits of your labour.

Good Luck

5

c) focus on keeping your torso as straight as possible, keep the twisting and turning to a minimum

but your hips kind of rotate in freestyle (backstroke too)
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