Focusing on my swimming

I have always loved the water.  Thanks to my mum, I was introduced to swimming lessons when I was 4 years old and I progressed well as a club swimmer.  My 'racing' stroke was breaststroke and I was always a pretty rubbish front crawl swimmer so years later when I took up triathlon and got back in the pool I died off after one length. 

Swimming is all about technique.  You have to get in the pool regularly,  as in a minimum of three times a week, to improve and maintain it.   It has taken hours and hours both in the pool and in open water, and while it has paid off there is always room for improvement.

I had a swim analysis in January in an endless pool which included a video analysis that critiqued my stroke and basically showed that I needed to improve my body position, stop my arms crossing, slow down my arm cadence, improve my kick,...and god so many other things but anyway I took away the report and after a couple of months gradually saw my swimming pace get significantly faster from around 2.15 / 100m to around 2.00/ 100m in the pool and a bit faster in open water when helped by the buoyancy of a wetsuit.  I completed my 3.8k race swim in 1.21 and was really happy with that.  

However, this month I realised despite all my efforts my speed had stopped improving.   My coach Paul offered to get in the pool with me and take a look.  That one hour session was really helpful.  He immediately identified that while my body position was fine in the water I was not getting a good enough catch and pull to my swim.

The catch and pull technique is something that has been explained to me before by swimming coaches but generally quite hard to understand.  That is maybe because they have been explaining it usually while standing above me at the side of the pool and not in it actually demonstrating what they mean.  

Essentially, it is all about getting a good entry point for your hand and keeping a high elbow through the pull phase as well as engaging your lats.  www.swimsmooth.com has a really good explanation of this.

I also found this short film by Olympic Chloe Sutton one of the best ones that explains how to get a good catch and pull https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1OY_yQBiXM&t=452s

Since the session with Paul I have been in the pool working on specific drills that will help my technique and while it still feels a bit unnatural to swim this way I am already seeing improvements in my time.  My lunchtime swim today was 1.56 / 100m.

So my advice for anyone keen to make some improvements would be to find an experienced coach to preferably join you for a swim and look at your swim technique, then get some drills to correct your stroke incorporated into your pool sessions so that you can maximise swimming throughout the off season.

Happy swimming!

Lx