This is the 12th of 12 Weeks of Guppy. Many of you entered the Challenge formally on our Training Log; many have followed along informally. Thanks to you all. As you know, the Challenge was different this year because for the first time the workouts were available either by reading, downloading, using the workouts in the traditional way; or you could have them delivered to you in your FORM goggles.

As to that latter method, the biggest differences are that you don’t need a pool clock; and you get to use “prescribed rest” rather than “leave interval” as the interval workout platform.

But one thing happened between the beginning and the end of the Guppy Challenge: FORM delivered the game-changing feature much anticipated prior to now: the Workout Builder. This is the same feature that turned stationary cycling into a *thing*: the ability to build your own smart workout and deliver it to a smart trainer. For both users and their coaches, this is a must and FORM now has this.

In the case of the Guppy Challenge you didn’t need this feature, because your workouts were made. But this is the final week. Where do you go from here?

I’m like most of you. I didn’t come from a swim background; I have 2 other sports to wrangle; swimming is very important to me but my swim needs to improve inside athletic and lifestyle constraints I can’t escape. I’m going to just give you a snapshot of my own swim life and this might give you some small guidance.

I’m signed up for the Ho’ala Swim, which will take place in about 5 weeks, the week prior to the Hawaiian IRONMAN Triathlon in Kona. It’s held on the IRONMAN swim course. Of course I’m going to Kona because “this is the business we’ve chosen.” The Ho’ala swim is part of the fun I tweeze out of that week. But I took months off of swimming because I spent most of this past spring in constant atrial fibrillation; then recovery from an ablation to solve my afib; followed by catching COVID right after my swimming recommenced. So, I had to restart from zero, or less than zero, just a few weeks ago.

I write this not so you can cry me a river, but to tell you my strategy for recovery and, really, the battle plan in place every year since my pool closes for the winter and I face this almost annually. I don’t think you should necessarily do what I do, but if you know my plan there might be something in there for you.

The hallmarks of my return-to-swim plan are:

1. My target yardage, per workout, is from 2,000 to 3,000 per workout, and in the low 3,000s on occasion. My initial goal is to increase my yardage over the first few days so that I could comfortably swim 2,000+ yards per workout.

2. I have 3 goals for my workouts: increase fitness; increase my top speed, which eventually influences my speed during a distance swim; perfect my technique. I can’t, when unfit, swim very long before my technique breaks down. Early in my fitness my workouts consist of short distances with rest. A lot of 50s. It might be that the whole workout is just 50s, maybe 40 or 50 of them, because when I’m unfit 50 yards is as far as I can swim without my technique breaking down. If I want to swim 2,400 yards but all I can swim before my technique goes to heck is 50 yards, then I’m swimming a lot of 50s! As I get fitter, I increase my distances per repeat, and I’m swimming sets of 75 yards x however many, then I swim repeat 100s, 125s, 200s, 250s, and eventually repeat 400s.

3. I alternate between long and short rest sets. In the long rest sets I’m swimming 50s, 75s, 100s, not very many, and those swims are all-out. I do those no more than once a week. I can’t do an all-out (or near all-out) swim longer than 100yd.

4. The short rest sets are long in distance and duration and I’m just trying to comfortably make the interval. Let’s say my goal is to swim 3000 yards in something faster than 1:30 pace per each 100 yards. One workout that gives me a good indication I can do that if is I swim 6 x 400yd, leaving on the 6 minutes or maybe 6:10. But I need to get the point where I can swim that workout. The progression of workouts to get there goes something like this. Yesterday I swam 12 x 125yd leaving on the 2min. That’s a 1500 yard set in total, and the leave interval is 1min36sec (my swim plus my rest is done at a pace of 1:36 per 100 yards). Next I’ll do 8 x 250yd leaving on the 4min. That’s a 2000yd set on that same leave interval. Then it’s 12 x 200yd leaving on the 3:10. That’s a 2400yd set leaving on the 1:35 interval. As you see, I’m creeping up on that final set, the 6 x 400yd set on the 1:30 interval. This is as much for my brain as for my fitness. I know I’m getting closer to the goal with every successful completion of that workout, even if it’s touch-and-go near the end of the set.

As you see, the distances I swim in each of these longer sets grows. The total distance of might grow or might not, but the distance of the swims themselves grow. This is because, as I get fitter, I’m able to hold my technique longer. Ideal front crawl technique is not natural nor is it intuitive. I have to constantly think about technique. All the time. Regardless of how fit I am. Swimming freestyle is like marriage: Even when it’s going really well you’re a fool if you take that for granted.

I begin my swim sessions with a warm-up of perhaps 600 yards. I might swim a set of 50s, 6 of them, giving me 10 to 15 seconds rest between. Then I might throw a buoy between my legs for another set of 6 x 50, and think just about technique. That buoy makes me keep my body in line, and umasks my laziness if I’m not obeying the technical rules that keep my body linear along the major axis.

Here's the Guppy Challenge Series, in partnership with FORM goggles, the entire 12 weeks:

Guppy Challenge Week 1; Workouts for Week 1
Guppy Challenge Week 2; Workouts for Week 2
Guppy Challenge Week 3; Workouts for Week 3
The High Elbows of Good Swimmers; Workouts for Week 4
Swim Paraphernalia for Guppies; Workouts for Week 5
Swimming Isn’t Intuitive; Workouts for Week 6
Debunked Swim Mythology; Workouts for Week 7
Every Swim Workout is a Race… Not! Workouts for Week 8
Visualization, Relaxation, Emulation; Workouts for Week 9
What is Body Rotation in Freestyle? Workouts for Week 10
Lift as a Relevant Force in Swimming. Workouts for Week 11
Final Week! Guppy Week-12. Workouts for Week 12

The post Final Week! Guppy Week-12 first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Powerboat designers create hulls that allow the boat to plane in the water. Lift is the force responsible for this. Swimmers will never exhibit lift in the way powerboats do, but lift is still a component of freestyle. Lift is worth discussing once you’ve mastered everything else and this is what remains.

This is an advanced concept, and you won’t find too many discussions on the topic of lift in swimming. But we’re nearing the end of the Guppy Challenge and I thought the time is right.

When my swimming is going really well – a rare moment in time when I’m at my fittest – lift becomes a noticeable component of my extend phase (or glide, or whatever you want to call that part of the swim stroke immediately after the catch). My hand for sure, and to a degree my whole arm, is better able to remain parallel to the surface of the water and not far below it. My minor shoulder muscles have finally adapted to a high elbow posture during the pull. Only when I’m really ready to swim my most efficient freestyle am I in a position to generate, or participate in, lift during this phase.

That said, when I see lift written about it’s upon commencement of the pull phase. I emailed Gary Hall, Sr., about this. He’s the first on a very short list who I felt I could discuss this with who I’m confident knows what he’s talking about.

I asked him if, indeed, lift occurs during the extend phase of freestyle, or am I hallucinating? Again? “Is my body a fabulist,” I asked Gary, “telling me a story about lift that in fact isn’t true. Is there no lift occurring during this extend phase of freestyle?”

Gary replied by writing, “When the arm and hand are stretched out in front of the swimmer, and before any downward force is applied, they act like a wing. The lift generated by the Bernoulli effect is determined by the speed and shape of the moving arm/hand and body. For guys like Sun Yang with long levers, a 60 stroke rate, holding for about a second in front on each stroke, there is probably some significant Bernoulli effect of lift. It is not a coincidence that swimmers deliver their strong surge kick and often reach their highest velocity in the cycle right after the arm enters the water, causing more lift. The lift from the Bernoulli effect would be most pronounced in the hip driven or hybrid freestyle technique, not the shoulder driven technique.”

Gary replied by writing, “When the arm and hand are stretched out in front of the swimmer, and before any downward force is applied, they act like a wing. The lift generated by the Bernoulli effect is determined by the speed and shape of the moving arm/hand and body. For guys like Sun Yang with long levers, a 60 stroke rate, holding for about a second in front on each stroke, there is probably some significant Bernoulli effect of lift. It is not a coinci

There’s some controversy around the Bernoulli Effect in swimming. The revered swim coach Ernie Maglischo wrote in his 1982 book about the Bernoulli Effect, but in the context of the pull phase. Maglischo reportedly wrote in a subsequent edition that he was wrong about that. It’s strict Newtonian physics during the pull. Forget S patterns and pressure differentials. Grip and rip it, in other words.

This is consistent with what Gary wrote me above. He continued on: “However, I still believe that most of the lift from the front end of the swimmer is derived after the catch, from the swimmer pressing down at the beginning of the pulling motion…the Newtonian lift, not from the ‘wing’. The arm and hand are not really a great wing.”

If I understand Gary right, he’s limiting his Bernoulli Effect comments to the extend phase. After that, Newtonian. The change of motion of an object is proportional to the force impressed; and is made in the direction of the straight line in which the force is impressed. Newton’s Second Law of Motion.

Back to the extend phase, though. I’m not actively attempting to gain lift here. It’s not like my hand is an aileron. The posture of my hand in the water is subtle and the Bernoulli Effect isn’t about water hitting your louvre-like angled-up hand; it’s about the difference in pressure between the water above and below your hand. This whole thing is subtle and when I look at really good high elbow anchor specialists – when I look at a Grant Hackett video – it’s hard to see an attempt at lift during the extend phase. But I think it’s there. In fact, I think some subtle lift is what helps good swimmers keep their hands close to the surface during the extend phase.

Once the swimmer has exhausted the benefit of his or her arm extension and must commence the pull, this is where, according to Gary in the quote above, “most of the lift” occurs. But in this case, it’s not just “lift” that helps keep the arm and hand near the surface after the catch, but “lift” as a force that very slightly raises the “hull” of the body out of the water. Lift takes place because the very first action after the extend phase is a downward press on the water.

This would be the case regardless, because the hand and forearm must get from parallel to perpendicular in the water. The hand travels, like a spear, through the water, but then must translate to become a canoe paddle in the water. That moment of translation requires the hand to press down on the water, which means lift.

Here’s when you get zero lift: If your hand drifts down during the extend phase. In this case, you’re not getting lift during the extend phase, and you won’t get the benefit of lift from that press-down motion during that translation of the arm from spear to paddle. That drift-down is the rule, not the exception. This describes most swimmers… and me too, unless it’s one of those rare moments when I’m really swim fit and I’m paying attention to my technique.

Finally, did you notice that FORM Goggles now has a workout builder? This is a big deal and flips the switch, for me. I love the goggle; the instant feedback; real-time, all-the-time, clock knowledge; but I also love writing my own workouts.

The Guppy Challenge Series, in partnership with FORM goggles, thus far:

Guppy Challenge Week 1; Workouts for Week 1
Guppy Challenge Week 2; Workouts for Week 2
Guppy Challenge Week 3; Workouts for Week 3
The High Elbows of Good Swimmers; Workouts for Week 4
Swim Paraphernalia for Guppies; Workouts for Week 5
Swimming Isn’t Intuitive; Workouts for Week 6
Debunked Swim Mythology; Workouts for Week 7
Every Swim Workout is a Race… Not! Workouts for Week 8
Visualization, Relaxation, Emulation; Workouts for Week 9
What is Body Rotation in Freestyle? Workouts for Week 10
Lift as a Relevant Force in Swimming. Workouts for Week 11

The post Lift, as a Relevant Force in Swimming first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Search “freestyle body rotation” on the web and look for videos. You’ll see movie after movie of swimmers performing what look almost like catch-up stroke drills, with all the technical swim elements we’ve been talking about throughout the Guppy Challenge series.

These experts preach a 45° angle, that is to say, your body rotates around what swimming coaches call the “long axis,” which is the axis about which you spin if you shish-ka-bob yourself with a skewer passing right through your head and body. To keep with the analogy, imagine you’re getting roasted on the spit, body turning around so that all of you can evenly cook. The difference is, you’re not rotating in a circle, but back and forth, like a washing machine agitator, 45° in each direction.

When I watch videos of you-all swim I often don’t see 45° on each side; rather more than 45° on your breathing side, and no rotation at all on the other side. If you look at those videos you’ll see that body rotation is pretty symmetrical among good swimmers on both sides, even if you only breathe on one side. The image below is a pretty good example of that 45° rotation, which is occurring in the absence of a breath taken. If this swimmer was to swim several strokes on 1 breath the same body rotation would be there.

Teaching body rotation is relatively new. This, along with high elbow during the pull phase, was not taught when I began swimming in earnest as a triathlete 40-plus years ago. In fact, two things have changed in that time: the way freestyle is taught, and the way freestyle is taught to adult onset swimmers. The great revolution in adult swim instruction is almost wholly due to triathlon. During the 1980s triathletes discovered masters swimming and the best masters coaches realized that their methods for teaching were deficient. Triathletes really suffered through the inability of coaches to get the point across to triathletes learning to swim.

“Extend!” my masters coach would tell me. “Reach!” Only to be followed by, “You’re crossing over!” The more I reached the more I would cross over. Why? Because I wasn’t rotating about the long axis. I was bending at the waist, or curling my torso, every time I breathed, causing my legs to splay. The more I reached the greater the crossover. (Crossover is when your hand crosses the centerline of your body during the catch.) I never did understand what my coach was saying while she was my coach; and she never considered how she might explain herself better.

One more thing I'll mention and then I’ll let you be. I’m unsure about whether body rotation fully includes the legs. Imagine wringing the water out of a kitchen hand towel, twisting the ends of the towel in opposite directions. There is no bend in the body during freestyle. No bend at the waist. You remain linear along that long axis. But when you rotate from side to side, is there a twist at all, where the body from – say – the hips to the shoulders engage in that full 45° rotation to the left and then to the right, while the legs down to your feet don’t rotation quite that much? Do the legs remain a little more planar? Do the feet rotate across that full 90° span?

I don’t know. I never hear or read anything about this when I investigate what other coaches say about rotation. My personal discipline: I swim better when I try to both engage in that full rotation, but I also focus on keeping my toes pointed toward the bottom when I kick. I don’t know whether there is any twist in my body along my long axis or not. I will let the better swim coaches opine on this.

The Guppy Challenge Series, in partnership with FORM goggles, thus far:

Guppy Challenge Week 1; Workouts for Week 1
Guppy Challenge Week 2; Workouts for Week 2
Guppy Challenge Week 3; Workouts for Week 3
The High Elbows of Good Swimmers; Workouts for Week 4
Swim Paraphernalia for Guppies; Workouts for Week 5
Swimming Isn’t Intuitive; Workouts for Week 6
Debunked Swim Mythology; Workouts for Week 7
Every Swim Workout is a Race… Not! Workouts for Week 8
Visualization, Relaxation, Emulation; Workouts for Week 9
What is Body Rotation in Freestyle? Workouts for Week 10

The post What is Body Rotation in Freestyle? first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

This is Week-9 of the Guppy Challenge, in partnership with FORM goggles, and we're nearing the clubhouse turn! I have some hopes for you as we close out these final weeks.

My first hope is that you know what you need to look like when you swim, or that you want to know, or that you know that you need to know and you have a plan for this. This is visualization. Remember, we have a swim video thread on our Reader Forum, if you’re brave and shameless enough to post a video of your own swimming. Also in that thread is a video of Grant Hackett. You could do way worse than just watch this video over and over.

I remember the 8 months that I devoted to swimming, back in the 1980s. My measuring stick was a time trial I would perform from time to time, 1000 yards, starting from the wall. When I finally got fed up with the state of my swim my PR was 13:52. Eight months later my PR for this time trial was 12:26. A big part of what I did was watch good swimmers swim. I would get to a particular swim workout 30 minutes early, where a group of high caliber swimmers were finishing their workouts. I remember watching one of them swim 100 yard interals repeating on the 1:05, looking effortless. I just watched them swim, and absorbed what I saw.

That’s the first part: visualization. But that’s not enough. Emulation – the ability to copy, to mimic, to parrot – is a skill. Well, it’s at least a gift. Whether it’s a skill – whether the ability to mimic is learnable – I don’t know for sure. But I think it is. I believe it’s learnable because it’s how not just humans, but mammals, survive. But you can’t just assume that watching is enough. Emulation should be a discipline, I think. Imprint the important elements of the good swim stroke in your mind. You need to watch a lot of good swimmers and watch them a lot. I spent hours, in the aggregate, just watching good swimmers swim, with the goal of emulating them. As I lay my head on my pillow most nights, instead of counting sheep I would just watch, in my brain, good swimmers swim. The more I absorbed and internalized images of good swimmers the more I swam like a good swimmer.

This last point is a little divergent from the first two, and I’ve wanted to write about this here on Slowtwitch for many years but I never really knew how to convey the idea. When I was a runner in high school I vividly remember track workouts that were just over-the-top hard. As a 15 year-old the plan was to run 12 x 400 yard repeats and run them in 64 seconds. After the first 3 of them it was, like, no way! No way am I going to get through 12 of these, at least not at this effort level. Here is the thought that came to me – my mantra if you will: Figure out a way to do the last 9 of these 400s, at this pace. Jettison the effort that is not necessary. Find a way to relax, rather than to contract.

What I find in sport is that there are a lot of moments during an activity when relaxation is available to you, and I don’t mean 5 or 10 seconds prized out of a 15 minute race. I mean a fraction of a second – a tenth or two tenths – inside of every stroke or cadence cycle. Or, a moment heading into the wall of a flip turn.

Or, maybe there’s a part of your body that you can relax while the rest of your body is engaged in the work. Your arm carriage when you’re running fast, perhaps.

I find that relaxation is – ironically – an active endeavor. You have to work at relaxing. You must actively seek moments or ways to relax inside of a hard effort. You must focus your energy toward the job of propulsion at the pace that is required in order to win the race; and if you’re like like me you’re not talented enough to win the race based on what God and your parents gave you. Physically gave you. But they gave you another edge, perhaps, and that is the capacity to figure out how to strain less. How to think your way to straining less while going that required pace.

So, visualization, emulation, relaxation. Whether swim, bike or run.

What you’ll see in this week’s Guppy workouts is your first 3000 yard day. Bravo if you do it! Once you get to 3000 yards, those are pro yards. Not pro swimmer yards, but pro triathlete yards. You can do this workout knowing that a lot of pro triathletes are not going to swim any more than this in a workout or, if they do, a “3” is the first number in the yardage total.

If you want to swim a 4th workout this week, here you go. This is my typical nonstandard swim workout that I like to do and in fact I did this yesterday:

12 x 50yd, repeating on an interval giving you 10sec to 15sec rest
4 x 75yd, repeating on a tighter interval, giving you 5sec to 15sec rest
12 x 50yd, repeating on an interval giving you 10sec to 15sec rest
4 x 75yd, repeating on a tighter interval, giving you 5sec to 15sec rest
12 x 50yd, repeating on an interval giving you 10sec to 15sec rest

This is a 2400 yard set. One set. One set and you’re done. No break in between any of these elements, like it’s a straight swim. The hard part is figuring out how to create the interval so that after each element you’re ending with the clock on the top, to start your second element.

But it’s not that hard to figure out. If you perform your 50s repeating on the :50, the :55, the 1:00, the 1:05, or the 1:10 in each case after 12 of them you’ll finish ready to leave on the top. If you perform your 75s leaving on the 1:15, the 1:30, or the 1:45 you’ll finish 4 of them ready to commence your next set of 50s on the top. So, those are your possible leave intervals.

There is no warmup or warmdown because the first and last elements of this mega-set kind of amount to those. The leave interval should be pretty easy on the 50s. It’s just a case of making the interval and not working too hard. The 75s is where you work hard during this workout.

The Guppy Challenge Series, in partnership with FORM goggles, thus far:

Guppy Challenge Week 1; Workouts for Week 1
Guppy Challenge Week 2; Workouts for Week 2
Guppy Challenge Week 3; Workouts for Week 3
The High Elbows of Good Swimmers; Workouts for Week 4
Swim Paraphernalia for Guppies; Workouts for Week 5
Swimming Isn’t Intuitive; Workouts for Week 6
Debunked Swim Mythology; Workouts for Week 7
Every Swim Workout is a Race… Not! Workouts for Week 8
Visualization, Relaxation, Emulation; Workouts for Week 9

The post Visualization, Emulation, Relaxation first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Like Three Days of the Condor, this is Eight Weeks of the Guppy. Four weeks to go. The Guppy Challenge features workouts delivered two ways: the traditional way you’re getting them here, via these articles; and preloaded into your FORM goggle. If you get your workouts the FORM way there are 5 obvious advantages: prescribed rest instead of leave interval; you don’t need a pool clock; you know your pace real-time all the time; your effort automatically uploads to your connected app; you don’t need to remember or refer to the printed workout. There’s a lot of other advantages (like post-swim analytics) but we’ll start with those.

Regardless of whether you’re a FORM-type person a pool clock-type person the axioms of swim training apply. Two of this week’s 3 workouts don’t have you working that hard. The first is an outright easy day. You might wonder what the point is and this brings us to the first axiom. The most important thing you can do to get faster in the water is swim. That’s not as universally agreed upon as what you might think. But it’s time in the water that’ll make you faster, and it’s frequency and volume that count. How hard you work when you’re in the water is secondary.

What you do when you’re in the water is important of course, but it’s not whether you do 6x400yd or 12x200yd. What’s important is that you go to the pool with reasonable frequency (3x or 4x a week); that you swim anywhere from 2000yd to 4000yd when you’re there; and that you constantly work on your technique. The technical elements on which you’re working during this Challenge are twofold. The first is creating a pulling surface that’s perpendicular to the water – anchoring your entire arm, from your bicep to your fingertip, in that spot and pulling yourself past it. The second is a kick that looks not that different when you’re swimming then it does when you’re kicking. No leg-splay. Feet on the surface. Feet pointed mostly down, not sideways, as if you’re doing the sidestroke. Anybody who masters those two things is a fast swimmer, automatically. Kick sets, catch-up drill, 6k Switch, pull sets, all are designed to help you fix 1 or both of these elements.

Back to effort. This is important whether you’re a swimmer or a triathlete. I wrote an article 22 years ago that had absolutely zero scientific basis underpinning it, and I don’t know to this day if academia has added anything to the discussion. Does the heart get tired? For sure, athletes sometimes get to a point in their training when their hearts can’t beat anywhere near their usual high cadence. The question is, did the heart get tired? Or did something else in the body get tired and the heart isn’t generating a high pulse rate because certain skeletal muscles (for example) aren’t working hard enough to elevate the heart rate? I suspect the heart can get tired and the fact that we don't have the formula for this is to me uncompelling. We also don't know, really, what causes something as basic as fatigue. So, as to this question, I have suspicions, but I don’t know. What I do know is that I had my first ablation for atrial fibrillation 6 weeks ago (fingers crossed, in sinus rhythm since then) and I can’t begin to count the friends of mine in their 60s who’ve had one arrhythmia or another. We don’t usually die from our arrhythmias, but they are the big sloppy kiss our heart gives us after redlining it for 4 decades.

For this reason I’m less interested nowadays in turning every workout into a high heart rate effort. It would be different if I didn’t also bike and run. If I just swam 3x a week, fine. But if I do 6, 8, 10 or more workouts a week, how often do I want my heart way up there? Remember, what’s important is not how hard I swim, but that I swim. There is 1 workout this week that is quite hard. For this reason, there should probably be bikes and runs this week where you don’t redline your heart.

I can give you youngsters the following bit of advice. As I have aged I have changed my behaviors. I don’t race every workout. I don’t drink; I sleep a lot; I got off my caffeine addiction; I’m very careful about my diet; I manage my stress; I manage my crises. I sometimes wonder what I could have done earlier in my life had I adopted these behaviors decades earlier.

For you intrepid souls who’ll need a 4th workout this week, here it is, but fair warning this is one of those go-hard workouts. If you go hard during this workout, you must back off certain other swim, bike and run workouts:

6x50yd warmup, on an interval giving you 10sec rest.
6x50yd alternating kick and swim: 1x50yd kicking, 1 swimming, 6 total.
10x150yd. Leave on the top or the bottom, whichever gets you closer to 40sec rest between each one. Swim these 150s kind of hard. Calculate and remember and average for each swim so that you can repeat this later, to see if you beat your average time.
2×50 or 1×100 easy as a warmdown.

Total yardage: 2,200

The Guppy Challenge Series, in partnership with FORM goggles, thus far:

Text for Guppy Challenge Week 1; Workouts for Week 1
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 2; Workouts for Week 2
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 3; Workouts for Week 3
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 4; Workouts for Week 4
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 5; Workouts for Week 5
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 6; Workouts for Week 6
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 7; Workouts for Week 7
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 8; Workouts for Week 8

The post Every Swim Workout is a Race… Not! first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

First a little housekeeping. Some of you have had a hard time seeing the workout tabs past a particular point in the Google Sheet containing these workouts. I have therefore split the display into discrete sheets for each week. Please advise if this does not fix the problem; otherwise I’ll assume it will. At the bottom of this page you’ll find links to each week’s workouts.

Let’s debunk some old thinking about swimming that you might’ve heard if you’re within spitting distance of my generation. Take for existence the S pattern. This is what I was taught when I was in swim classes in my youth. Of course this goes way back, to when Earl Scheib would “paint any car, any color, for $29.95.” I don’t know how long they continued to teach the S pattern but the idea was this: Once you moved still water, move your hand to another place so that you could begin pulling water that isn’t already moving.

Nobody believes that anymore. In fact, you couldn’t keep your hand in the same position in the water if you tried. Nevertheless, you should try. Pulling in any direction other than straight back is a bad habit.

Besides, I have a conceptual problem with the idea of pulling water, or with the concept of water that’s moving. You aren’t actually pulling water back, ideally. In my view, the most efficient stroke is one in which you’re anchoring your arm in the water and pulling yourself past the water, without your arm slipping. Grab and pull. Grip and rip it. No more S pattern.

This next one is a little controversial, and I don’t mean to tell swim coaches how to coach swimmers, but for you all, hypoxic workouts are a waste of time at best, and a detriment at worst. We get these in Masters team workouts, if we swim with such a group. The coach will tell you to breathe every 5th or 7th stroke and that might have some utility if your sport includes a lot of time underwater after a flip turn. But that’s not you. Oxygen is your friend. In fact, I don’t find a lot of benefit in bilateral breathing. That’s just a less hypoxic hypoxic drill. I do find it a huge value to become adept at breathing on your non-natural side. In fact, when I give you sets of 50s for warmup or warmdown I think it would be instructive to swim every other 50 breathing on your other side and let’s see if you can get the times for each 50 the same.

Minor point, but I was taught never to take a breath directly out of a flip turn. Turn, push off the wall, take a stroke without breathing, then take a breath on the second stroke. To me that's just a continuation of that same fixation on oxygen deprivation that old swim coaches have.

What is of real benefit to you is learning how to take consecutive breaths and that means 3:2 breathing (2 breaths per 3 strokes), generally leading to just taking a breath whenever you want. The older you get the more you’ll need to breathe. Taking consecutive breaths into or out of a flip turn will become second nature. This will serve you well in the open water when you need to sight to the other side; when swells from one side cause you to be more efficient breathing on the lee side; when someone swimming closely on your natural side means you’ll want to breathe on the other side; or because you’ll lose a breath through misadventure and you’ll need to get another breath quickly.

So, for sure, become adept at breathing on either side, but not through the forced application of bilateral breathing, which simply limits your oxygen intake.

Your yardage is going up, you may have noticed. Now it’s typically in the 2,500 or 2,600 yard range. If you haven’t already, invest in a pull buoy. And maybe some paddles. You’ll have begun to generate muscles that allow you to keep your elbow high during the pull phase; to bend at the elbow and use your entire arm as a pulling surface. But, again, don’t think if it as pushing water back; think if it as pulling yourself past water that isn’t moving at all.

Your extra credit set is pretty simple, if you intend to do a 4th swim this week. It’s 6 x 400yd, the first as a warmup, each one progressively harder. Just make sure each 400 is faster than the one before, even it’s just by a second or two. Give yourself at least 30sec rest, but start on the top each time. That means if you finish in, say, 6:25 you’ll leave on the 7min. If you finish in 6:45 then you leave on the 8min.

The Guppy Challenge Series, in partnership with FORM goggles, thus far:

Text for Guppy Challenge Week 1; Workouts for Week 1
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 2; Workouts for Week 2
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 3; Workouts for Week 3
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 4; Workouts for Week 4
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 5; Workouts for Week 5
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 6; Workouts for Week 6
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 7; Workouts for Week 7

The post Debunked Swim Mythology first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Back in 2004 I wrote an article titled The High Cost of Good Form. My thesis runs contrary to what a lot of coaches say, depending on the sport. There’s a view – of which I’m skeptical – that you shouldn’t coach running technique; that everyone will find his or her best run form if they just run enough. We’ll agree to disagree on that.

But some sports are not like running, and swimming is the best example I can think of. There just is nothing intuitive about swimming. Good swim form requires not just knowing how to swim efficiently, but developing the capacity to perform that technique. What makes swimming maddening, frustrating, is that the adoption of good technique doesn’t translate to faster swim times until those muscles develop. Compare that to a grunt sport like cycling, where the best position (at least on a road race bike) is almost always the most powerful position. If you make a change in, say, saddle height a positive change should mean more power to the pedals. it might take weeks for a change in swim technique to pay a speed dividend.

What is it about freestyle that’s unintuitive? Well, freestyle for one thing. Just the whole stroke. The “front crawl” is about 180 years old, as practiced in the European world. Imagine that. Homo Sapiens is millions of years old, but we only figured out the most efficient way to propel ourselves in the medium that covers the globe in the last several generations. (West Africans were performing the front crawl for centuries prior to Europeans and White Americans, but that’s another story.)

So that’s the point. If it was intuitive, we’d have been doing the front crawl for a lot longer than we have. It’s not intuitive. The dog paddle is intuitive. Flailing is intuitive. The front crawl is taught and it makes no sense to stop there and say, “Once you’re taught the basics of the front crawl it, like running, is something that’ll eventually come naturally to you.”

We interviewed Alex Kostich a couple of years ago and below is one image accompanying that interview. He, like our sport’s own Gerry Rodrigues, remain overwhelmingly smart, classy open water swimmers even in the second half of their lifetimes. In this image below note the bent elbow, the pulling surface perpendicular to the medium through which he’s traveling and, hardest of all, the hand near the surface of the water during the extend phase (your hand drifts down after the catch; Alex’s doesn’t).

There’s a longtime triathlon coach, Marty Gaal, and here’s a link to a page. Just look at the still images of the front crawl on that page. This is learned. This is the front crawl optimized. This is hard. Nothing prepares you for this. Well, a Vasa ergomenter, or perhaps even just elastic bands with hand paddles, can help you develop the muscles, if you perform the exercise correctly. But I can’t think of a dryland task that uses the muscles you use in optimized front crawl. What about any of that looks like any act we perform in our daily lives?

For this reason, swimming for you and me consists of drills where you do it the right way, and then a lot of bulk swimming where you’re trying to do it the right way but in large part failing because we just don’t quite have the muscles. This is why most of the Guppy Challenge consists of repeat 50s, 100s, 200s, with rest in between. We perform drills like 6KSwitch, Catch-up, we pull, we bind our ankles, because from the core to the shoulders we’re working the rotator cuff, triceps, lats in ways they’re never used in any other activity and they’re too weak when we first begin. It takes months to build them up. So, we swim, we rest, we swim again, and the reason isn’t simply fitness; it’s because we’re not strong enough to perform that technique properly for a very long distance, until we've built those muscles up. Developing those muscles through repetition and rest is the high cost we pay to achieve good form.

I used the term "classy" to describe a couple of swimmers a bit higher up. There’s a saying in sport: Form is temporary, class is permanent. Form in this case describes fitness. Class describes technique. Once proper front crawl technique becomes a set of motor skills that sits on your brain stem, you have class. You can take a month or two off of swimming and the speed will come back more quickly, because the class is there. The image of Jordan Rapp, highest above, is of an ex-pro triathlete who started his athletic life as a lacrosse player and a rower. Class is achievable.

This week’s Guppy Challenge workouts are on the same Google Sheet as are all the other weeks’ workouts.

If you want to do a 4th swim this week, here’s what I did this morning:

• 12 x 50yd warmup, leaving on an interval that gave me 10 to 15sec rest.
• 50yd kicking
• 8 x 75yd, a little more rest, a little harder.
• 50yd kicking
• 3 x 100yd, a little harder, take about 30sec rest between each.
• 50yd kicking
• 1 x 300yd, not hard, just steady
• 50yd kicking

2000yd total.

The Guppy Challenge Series, in partnership with FORM goggles, thus far:

Text for Guppy Challenge Week 1; Workouts for Week 1
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 2; Workouts for Week 2
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 3; Workouts for Week 3
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 4; Workouts for Week 4
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 5; Workouts for Week 5
Text for Guppy Challenge Week 6; Workouts for Week 6

The post Swimming Isn’t Intuitive first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Some people bring truckloads of implements to their pool session; others bring goggles and call it good. I’m ambivalent. Whatever suits your style. I'll talk about swim paraphernalia below, but here you go if you're just interested in Week-5 workouts for Guppies.

But I don’t believe in implements for the sake of implements. Each thing Speedo or Finis wants to sell you has a purpose, or should. In my opinion the mandatory things, to get fast, are a goggle of some sort and a timing device. You can mix the two together in a FORM goggle, our partner in the Guppy Challenge. Either way, you have to have these two items. A swimsuit is nice, but that’s up to you and the authorities. And a towel is handy.

Beyond these, what paraphernalia is important and why?

Most folks who swim a lot bring a kickboard, paddles and a buoy to their sessions. The kickboard is obvious and some folks use fins while some don’t. I don’t use a kickboard because of a nasty bit of spinal stenosis that makes looking up hard for me. (Yes, this is a problem for me when riding a tri bike.) I can still kick with a kickboard, looking down or to the side, but there are ways to kick without using a board.

You might ask why it’s important to kick anyway, if you get very little propulsion from your kick. Good question. I’m not the expert on this but I think it’s important that we all remember what a proper kicking action looks and feels like. As we’ve seen in prior weeks and in the videos posted by users, there’s a lot of leg splay evidenced in your kicks, which is a big but solvable problem. Kick sets give you a reference point for what the kick should feel like. (Nobody splays their legs during kick sets.)

Now, about paddles and buoys. What is the point of a buoy? Why can’t you just use paddles and omit the buoy? Well, you could. But the buoy serves its own purpose and before we get to that let’s tackle paddles. If you ask 10 people why you swim with a paddle, 5 will say it’s about strength-building, and 5 will say it’s about technical improvement. They’re all correct. Paddles amplify what you do, that is, they shine a light on what you do well, or badly. We’ve been working, the past several weeks, in keeping your hand near the surface of the water during the extend phase of the stroke, then creating a pulling surface with your entire forarm. You bend your arm at the elbow, keep your elbow high during the pull, and then you pull straight back. When you do any of these things well, you can feel it with a paddle on. When you do any of the above tasks badly, you feel it with paddles on.

Back to the buoy. If you concentrate on keeping your feet together with the buoy in place (some folks will band their ankles to make sure this is the case) it’s pretty hard to swim with bad technique, especially if you’re using paddles. You’ve isolated and accentuated every part of the stroke. If you swim horribly, and much more slowly, with paddles and a buoy rejoice! You have a lot of improvement in front of you.

I wouldn’t go crazy on paddle size. Don’t strap a pair of trash can lids to your hands. Some folks omit the paddles and just swim with the buoy. All the above implements are helpful, or can be.

Like kick sets, center snorkels help remind you what a balanced stroke feels like. This isn’t replicated by bilateral breathing, which at its worst gives you an opportunity to breathe with poor technique on both sides. If you find swimming with a center snorkel really awkward, all the more reason to do it.

The Guppy Challenge gives you 3 workouts a week. If you need an extra credit swim, here’s another one that I like to do. It features a lot of short swims, the first 1200 yards as warmup. Yes, it’s a long warmup. But we’ll need it.
• 12 x 50yd repeating on an interval that gives you 10sec to 15sec rest. Swum easy.
• 8 x 75yd repeating on an interval that gives you about 20sec or 25sec rest. Swum moderately hard.
• 4 x 100yd, repeating on an interval giving you 20sec to 30sec rest. These are swum easy, to leave you primed for the finale. You may choose to do these drill, or pull them. Whenever you swim easy, that’s a good time to think about technique.
• 8 x 50yd swim hard. All-out, pretty much, with a long rest, on the order of 25sec to 40sec. Swim some of these breathing every 4th stroke. This is not a hypoxic set. Rather, swimming fast without taking breaths gives you a reminder of what good body position feels like.
• Choice of warmdown.

Take a minute or so between each set.

The Guppy Challenge Series, in partnership with FORM goggles, thus far:
Guppy Challenge Week 1
Guppy Challenge Week 2
Guppy Challenge Week 3
Guppy Challenge Week 4
Guppy Challenge Week 5

The post Swim Paraphernalia for Guppies first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

This week’s workouts are published. As we enter Week-4 of the Guppy Challenge, in partnership with FORM goggles, a couple of things to note.

First, we have our thread up on the Reader Forum where we analyze the techniques of our fellow Slowtwitchers. There’s a couple of posts up there now, where folks ask to have their swim strokes analyzed. If you read through there you’ll get a sense of the replies you’ll get if you choose to have your stroke dissected.

Before you go over there, look at the images in this article. This is pro triathlete Skye Moench and you can see one truth very clearly demonstrated: Her elbow is bent during her pull phase. “Yeah, so what?” you might ask. Now you can go look at the forum thread. If you watch each of the videos users posted, there is much to like about the techniques of both users.

But each of our users’ videos feature pretty straight arms under the water. Imagine a riverboat’s paddle wheel. This is what our readers are doing. But if you look at that paddle wheel – go look it up – you won’t see half the wheel in the water. Only a small portion is in the water, because only at the very bottom of that paddle wheel are the paddles pushing straight back. It works on a riverboat because there are many paddles on that wheel. There are only 2 “paddles” on your “wheel.”

Therefore, you need to make the most efficient use of that “paddle” and because your pulling surface only addresses the water twice during a full swim cycle you need to pull as much water as you can during your pull phase. For this reason, I recommend you look at the videos in that thread, to see what efficient and inefficient looks like. Just look at the series of images of Skye and you can see that she extends with her hand close to the surface, then keeps her elbow high while forming a pulling surface from the shoulder to the fingertip. Then she pulls straight back. Not down, not in S pattern. Grip it and rip it.

All the drills – 6k Switch, Catch up – and swimming with paddles and buoys, and even kicking, are designed to optimize body position, and to pull as much water as you can.

[PHOTOs: Eric Wynn, Slowtwitch Media House]

The post The High Elbows of Good Swimmers (Guppy Week 4) first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

It’s notoriously hard for good swim coaches to understand the problems we face, because they don’t encounter our problems when they coach lifelong swimmers who “speak” swimming as a first language. Please let me expand on that analogy.

What we have, as adult onset swimmers, is an accent. You can tell someone who comes from another county by his or her accent. Native speakers don’t have accents. Everybody speaks perfect accentless English or Spanish or French, “perfect” being the way people in those regions of those countries talk. The great majority of newcomers to a country or region speak that second language with an accent, and typical swim coaches are like English teachers (if it’s an English-speaking country). They’re teaching English and grammar to those who’re learning English as a first language. If your goal is to make someone talk like a native, you don’t need an English teacher. You need a dialogue coach.

The reason the late Doug Stern was such a huge success in the triathlon community is that he was a dialogue coach for us. He didn’t speak to us using a vocabulary we didn’t understand – that vocabulary coming from the world of swim. He learned to speak to us as would a dialogue coach teaching people who could “speak” swimming fluently, just with pronounced accents. Those “accents” are what kept us from swimming IRONMAN swims in under an hour. We weren’t going to drown. But we weren’t going to win either. We weren’t going to get the part in the movie, because the character in that movie didn’t speak with an accent.

If you’re a top swim coach to triathletes, like Tim Floyd or Gerry Rodrigues, your job is to meet triathletes where they are and to be their dialogue coach. (That's also our job in the Guppy Challenge.) But it is much harder to coach the dialogue out of someone than it is for them to learn to speak using normal children’s pathways, and this is why it’s so hard for triathletes who come to swimming late to become really good swimmers. It also explains why we listen and read what great swim coaches say and write and we have no idea what they’re talking about.

I did find some resources for you as I hunted around the web this week, and let’s see if we can bridge that gap a little. This is the Guppy Challenge, which we produce here in partnership with FORM, and the workouts for this week are embedded in their goggles, or you can read and download them here. As I wrote earlier in the month, the leave interval is a thing specific to swim and it flows to us because of the inconvenience of the pool clock. You can’t stop the pool clock. That’s the main reason for the leave interval. The FORM goggle unchains us from the pool clock and that’s why the “prescribed” interval I give you must be translated to the appropriate leave interval. For more on all the swim nomenclature (because swim coaches are famous for assuming we understand all their terms of art) I found this cheat sheet that’s pretty good at decoding some of that insider vocabulary.

The next resource is a video from Effortless Swimming that’s about over-rotation, but in that video is a kicking drill. The swimmer is kicking with fins, no kickboard, one arm outstretched. I like this drill because it’s hard to do it with a bad posture. It’s an anti-over-rotation drill, okay? But I see it as a kind of breathing drill, that is to say, I see this as a drill that teaches you how to breathe without pulling your body out of line.

Remember last week I wrote about the body rolling, like a log. Imagine a bullet from a gun. In order to get that bullet to shoot straight, about 500 years ago gunsmiths began to introduce “rifling” into the barrels of their guns, as opposed to the traditional smooth-bore style. Rifling on the inside of the barrel caused the bullet to spin about its axis while traveling straight and true. That’s what good swimmers do, except they don't keep spinning in one direction; they spin or "rotate" to one side and then the other, while their bodies remain true. But you can rotate too much and that video linked to above, exhorting you to perform that one-armed-Superman kicking drill, is supposed to stop that.

But I think that drill also helps correct a second problem, and in yet another Effortless Swimming video we see another problem described, and this is the one I nag you guys about. In this video you can see a swimmer who’s leg’s splay. I’m on you guys about this because this is the textbook thing that adult onset swimmers do. This is your “accent.” When I say that some of you folks “jackknife at the waist” when you breathe this is what I’m talking about. The swimmer in this video is reasonably fast, so he’s got a small dose of this problem, but it’s a big enough dose that you can clearly see his leg splay, which he does to compensate for how he breathes.

I love this video! But I specifically love the first half. The second half of that video, to me, a native-language swim coach teaching native-language swim to an adult onset swimmer (which I'd bet a buck this swimmer is). This is where swim coaches drive me crazy. They spend years teaching us front-quadrant or high-elbow-anchor technique, and then they chastise it when we finally get it right. This kind of stuff is maddening to adult onset swimmers. But I digress.

Where the narrator of this video is spot on is in his identification of the reason the legs splay. This swimmer has oodles of time to be made up in the water if he just learns to breathe without bending or twisting at the waist. Why do we bend or twist at the waist like that? Because we’re afraid of drowning! (Or we were.) So, we over-exaggerate the breathing motion, or we did when we were first learning to swim competitively, at age-23, or 31, or 45. This deep-brain-stem instinct is our accent that we have to root out of our speech.

The reason I ask you to swim with a buoy, with feet close together – or even with bound ankles – is that this leg splay becomes pronounced fishtailing when we’re not allowed to splay our legs. But the drill in that first video linked to above will also work nicely.

Whenever you see drills referenced in the workouts I give you, feel free to insert your favorites among the drills I mention. Again, here are this week’s workouts (and all the workouts for the first 3 weeks). If you'd like to log your workouts using your FORM goggle, and you don't have this yet, go here and typing slowtwitch into the promo code box gets you a 20 percent discount.

If you want to do an extra credit workout, here it is. A straight swim. Let’s do 300 yards of warmup. I like just some repeat 50s here, maybe 6x50yd on a leave interval that allows you 10sec to 15sec rest. Then, 1500 yards straight, after maybe 2min of rest after the warmup. Let’s get a time on the board. We’ll try this later in the Guppy Challenge and see if we’re making some progress.

The post Guppy Challenge Week 3 first appeared on Slowtwitch News.