If You are New to Swimming, Don't Make These Mistakes
I've spent a full year unlearning bad habits I built
Apologies that this one is a little late! I tripped myself up while I was on holiday and rented a place without WiFi and that also turned out to be a bunker for mobile signal too. So, without intending to I had almost a full week offline which was lovely! Anyways, on with the swimming stuff!
I still consider myself new to swimming, I’ve been swimming consistently for 2 years now but I have been a swimmer my whole life. I learned to swim in school like many kids in the UK, we didn’t learn to swim well but I could keep myself afloat and swim for a long time without taking breaks, I wasn’t fast, it wasn’t brilliant form but I could avoid drowning. That was the standard, for most people, that’s pretty decent.
Fast forward to today, I’m finally a pretty average swimmer when it comes to competitive freestyle swimming, at least in open water triathlons. We’ll get to the differences of open water vs pool swimming but let’s just say it’s easier to excel in open water if you build the right skills. However, I’m still struggling to become competitive in my age group on the swim because I built so many bad habits by trying to teach myself to swim freestyle. I also taught myself to swim open water, this was actually a big success but I’m still hamstrung by my poor technique that I built in the pool.
So if you want a TL;DR for the whole article it’s this; get yourself a swim coach or teacher if you’re learning freestyle for the first time. Friends of mine have already reached a similar if not better level of swimming speed and fitness than me in half the time because they learned the basics from someone who knew what they were doing. Get a coach or go to group lessons with your club, I promise you that you won’t regret it!
So let’s dig in to the mistakes I made so you can avoid them and learn from my hard won wisdom!
Technique is everything, distance means very little
Don’t go to the pool with the aim of getting the meters done. This is exactly what I did when I first started learning to swim, all that mattered in my head was being able to swim further than I did the last time. Well, being 100% honest with you, my initial aim was to swim a single 25M lap without stopping.
I now tell everyone who asks me for swimming advice the same thing; do the drills, do them until you don’t have to think about them, get them absolutely as close to perfection as you can before you worry about building fitness in the water. If you can’t hold good position, get good purchase on the water in the catch and pull or kick well you will just build junk fitness. It’s better to build up slowly and swim 1 or 2 laps at a time with perfect or near perfect form than swim 2KM with total junk form and just reinforce bad habits that you have to spend double the time unlearning.
Things to prioritise getting right:
Breathing - Learn how to breathe calmly and well by performing drills that keep you stationary in the water so all you have to think about is kicking and head position.
Catch drills - Perfect your catch & by proxy perfect your recovery too. A great recovery and catch will keep your body position in the water level and prevent the dreaded “seesaw”. More importantly, it makes all your efforts easier too!
Kick drills - Get those legs kicking from the hips and point those toes! Building an efficient kick with good power will make you super efficient in the water and will counterbalance your breathing and sighting actions to keep you level.
Seems easy on paper, this will take you months to get good at, there are no shortcuts worth taking. I took all the shortcuts and they have proven to be plateaus in the making. Trust me on this, investing the first 6 months to 1 year of your swimming journey to perfecting the basic drills that give you solid technique will repay you like compound interest!
Fitness comes last, but it is important
Unlike running and cycling, fitness in swimming is the top of the pyramid, not the bottom of it. Like we’ve already talked about, technique is absolutely paramount in swimming. You shouldn’t worry about building your metres and pace until you’ve got solid technique that a coach is happy with when they observe you in the pool.
Now, all that said, you do need to spend at least some of your time overloading yourself to improve your work rate. Work rate is just a sports science term for how much you can do or how far you can go at what pace.
The thing I got wrong was increasing my yardage with junk technique. However, you can build fitness while also training technique, to do this we can borrow from our pals in the world of body building and functional strength. Yep, that’s right, the gym bro’s & sisters have got some wisdom that us swimmers and triathletes can learn from!
In the gym, you can increase your tolerance for load (amount of weight) by increasing your work rate. This is done by adding reps and then sets of weight that you can already lift competently, for example, if you can squat 60KG for 2 sets of 8 reps, to increase your work rate you add an additional 1-2 reps after you finish your 2 sets. The idea is that an additional 1 or 2 reps isn’t too taxing if you can already do 2 sets at that weight, however, you are adding overload because your body is only ever used to doing 16 total reps at that weight, now you want it to do 18.
Once you build up to being able to do 3 sets of 8 reps at 60KG in our squat example, you can then drop back down to 2 sets of 8 but increase the weight by up to 10%. This is how to safely increase your work rate so that you can achieve higher load on the body while giving the body a chance to adapt and crucially build the endurance required for higher loading in future.
I hear you, what’s any of this got to do with swimming? Well, rather than just building fitness through hitting your yardage goals in that session, I found that I built a great deal of my fitness and strength in the water by doing lots of reps of technique drills. This is where we come full circle to the weight lifting concepts I shared above, you can build your tolerance for load (yards & meters) in the pool or open water by increasing your reps of those technique drills. Think of each lap you do of a drill as a rep, if you can keep good form on a one arm catch drill for 3 laps, then add a lap. This builds endurance, increases your work rate and ultimately engrains those good habits even further!
So fitness is important as it allows you to do more, better. However, fitness should be the byproduct of your pool sessions, technique will build your fitness if done well. You will reach a point where you need to do big sets of laps, however, making sure you can nail all your drills with great technique is the first step you need on that ladder.
If you are a triathlete, get in the open water, regularly
I really cannot emphasise this enough, get in the sea… Or a lake or reservoir. Swimming in a pool is great to master your stroke and build good habits. Open water on the other hand is a whole other beast that you need to tame. If you want to succeed in triathlon and make the swim cutoffs, not to mention save some energy for those other 2 disciplines you need to complete, being able to sight, navigate and adapt to choppy conditions is essential!
Much like technique drills in the pool, exposure to open water swimming and practicing those specific skills is crucial to a great open water swim. The best thing to do is just get in and have a go (in a lifeguarded open water venue I should stress!).
Sighting in my opinion is more of an art than a science or a matter of good technique. Everyone seems to find their preferred rhythm of sighting to stroke ratio and how you sight really does depend on how you swim. Most people will tell you that there is a right and a wrong way to perform sighting, the old adage of “crocodile eyes” comes up a lot, however, you’re more often than not swimming in a wetsuit in open water meaning that you can get away with some questionable form when sighting as the added buoyancy will keep your body position where it needs to be.
All that said, you should at least try to get your sighting technique dialled in as much as you can because some swims will be non-wetsuit, the resulting poor sighting can cause you to perform the dreaded “seesaw” in the water and lose momentum.
The main thing to focus on is not raising your head up more than you need to, hence “crocodile eyes” and making sure you can actually find your landmark, usually a brightly coloured buoy, on the horizon. After all, you can have textbook sighting technique, but if you can’t actually spot what you need to, you will just go the wrong way anyway!
Lastly for open water, you want to use this time to figure out & correct any stroke imbalances, using myself as an example; I used to be right side dominant in my stroke, which, when you don’t have a black line to follow in the pool means you tend to swim in circles! Most swimmers will have a dominant side of the stroke that generates more propulsion than the other, once you figure this out, you can use your pool sessions to improve the balance of your stroke and build strength in the opposite arm.
Hopefully I’ve convinced you that exposure to open water early on will get you comfortable with the skills you need to keep swimming in the right direction. It will also give you data to work on balancing out your stroke and prevent you from going round in circles, mind you, that is a bit of a right of passage!
I understand that not all of us are lucky enough to have good and safe local open water swimming spots. In that case, swimming with your eyes shut in the pool can also build these skills up and then only opening them when sighting, it’s not quite the same but it will do the trick if you don’t have another option!
I hope this has helped anyone new to swimming or just those of you who have suffered the same introduction to swimming that I have as an adult. Keep up the practice and you will get there, just double down on building great technique and you will find yourself falling in love with the pool and the open water I promise! It took some time for me to no longer dread a swim session, but once you get there and swimming becomes almost effortless, you will start to really look forward to those pool sessions.
If you’ve found this useful and think a fellow triathlete may find it interesting, please do share it!