We are just a few weeks away from the next Fawz Concept Swimming Camp: a Six Week September Season Starter.

In light of this, we are going to share 6 tips for Triathlon Swimming. We aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel here; we are actually trying to keep swimming training as simple as possible for triathletes. After all, we chose a sport that involves three disciplines, so it is already complicated enough!

Tip #1 – Warm Up Effectively

The main purpose of a warm up is to increase your heart rate, so your blood and importantly oxygen are travelling to your muscles faster for exercise. The more effectively you warm up; the better your “feel” in the water is, the better you perform on the main set and the better you minimise your risk of injury. Win, win, win. Therefore, take your time to do a long warm up preferably over 800m, which will in turn help to improve your endurance. This warm up can be progressive, and it can incorporate some purposeful drills. Rest intervals are definitely not necessary here, as we are trying to steadily increase your heart rate to prepare for the session.

Example Warm Up: 800m as 200m Swim, 200m Paddles, 200m Paddles and Pullbuoy, 200m Swim Descending every 50m (rest time is changing equipment!)

Tip #2 – Have a Purpose

Us triathletes don’t have much free time on our hands; therefore, every session must serve a purpose towards our goals, no matter whether it’s an intense session or just a recovery session. This is similar to providing a title or a lesson objective to a class; not only does it give value to the session; it also helps the individual to know what their target is during the session.

Some example aims of swim sessions could be:

· strength (lots of paddles and pullbuoy work)

· endurance (steady aerobic and longer distance intervals)

· race pace (sharp, fast intervals)

· recovery (slow, often done by feeling and untimed)

We have witnessed main sets involving steady work, then hypoxic work (changing breath pattern), then descending work, then a fast 1st and last 50m… and it all just seems a jumble with no one sense of direction. It is much easier to visualise and obtain a target if it is spelled out clearly at the start of the session.

Tip #3 – Include Beneficial Drills

There are a couple of cautionary caveats we want to share about including drills as part of your swimming session.

1) Is this drill specifically targeted towards your own individual needs?

2) Do you understand the purpose of this drill and how it will translate to swimming full stroke afterwards?

3) Is the timing of the drill work helpful?

4) Are you satisfied with the amount of drill work you are doing?

Drills are best used towards the end of the warm up, again to help to prepare your stroke and your feel of the water. There is not much benefit when adding these on at the end of the session to increase your meterage before you climb out of the pool. They should also be used sparingly, as they could become counterproductive and actually emphasise your stroke faults if you do more than 800m worth of drills. We personally love sculling and we have many variations of this drill to improve your feeling and catch in the water. Do evaluate the use of drills and their benefit. Similarly, if your coach asked you to cycle around Al Qudra single legged, would you be satisfied?

Tip #4 – Ensure Intensity

We all love a coach that is generous on the rest and we all love a good natter at the end of each interval (us included!). However, it is important that you ask yourself if you are working at a good level of intensity that will benefit you in your triathlon swim where you don’t get any rest bite. A good main set we always do in the week building up to a 70.3 race is:

8 x 100m at Race Pace 100m with just 10 seconds rest between each interval

It sounds simple, but we actually don’t believe many people are able to handle this intensity of a short workout: just make sure you aren’t over-resting during the main set.

Tip #5 – Limit Variation

We know that coaches are trying to keep the sets varied because swimming is often considered the “boring” discipline, but we think it is hard to justify the purpose of swimming 75m or even 175m sets, especially when you have no idea what target time you should be aiming for. This is similar to doing 700m intervals on the track; good luck finding a world class athlete that does main sets like this. Let’s keep it simple and effective and not try to be too creative: 20 x 100’s or even 8 x 200’s is a perfect set that you can swim at a controlled pace, with a given target time and even be able to accurately measure your progress over time. With the correct target times and motivation, you will hopefully learn to thrive on a traditional set like this.

Tip #6 – Use Your Watch Sparingly

We appreciate the importance of recording all of your training data for your Strava and Training Peaks records, but it is important that you aren’t making mistakes when using the watch during your swims, which could cause inaccurate TSS scores. Notably:

· Are you stopping your watch completely at the end of each interval? 8 x 100m at 1:30 pace with 30 seconds rest is NOT the same intensity as 800m continuous in 12 minutes.

· Are you really looking back at each 25m and 50m interval in your data? Probably not, so just keep the watch going and use a simple pool clock instead to track your progress throughout the session.

· Are you clicking the watch before you even touch the wall? This makes your data a lot faster on your watch, but your real time swimming data slower. It also becomes quite a faff if you are wearing paddles and causing inaccurate rest times as a result.

Our best advice is to just keep the watch running throughout your swim time or use “drill log”. It will measure your total distance swum and take into account the rest time you had during the session, in turn calculating an accurate intensity and TSS score.

If you have found yourself nodding along, or even laughing to yourself a little bit when reading this article… then feel very welcome to come and join our next Fawz Concept swimming camp starting on the 1stSeptember. We can promise it will be a 6-week purposeful, meaningful and non-time-wasting experience. We will have 3 sessions a week, where you will be hitting over 3km each time at the correct pace for you and you will be able to reiterate the learning aims and outcomes of the session (not because we are trying to be smart arses, but because we know you deserve to know and achieve the purpose of each session). A ‘test set’ at the start and end of the camp will help you to measure your overall progress too.

DM us on Instagram or Email us admin@fawzconcept.com if you would like to sign up or find out more information.

Six Swimming Tips for September