For the vast majority of us, taking part in a triathlon means that we will be swimming in an open water environment, which is significantly different to swimming up and down in a swimming pool. Now, with that change in environment, there's a need to slightly alter our swimming style and our stroke. But why is that and how?
Well, Today, I'm going to be exploring the components of a triathlon-specific swim stroke and explaining how you can adapt your own swimming stroke so that you can better cope with that open water environment in your next triathlon. Now the first thing you might notice with a triathlon swim stroke is, well, it can look quite awful. I mean, take Mark's swim stroke.
By his own admission, he windmills his arms along like nobody's business. In comparison to a regular swimmer's stroke, its contrast is, well, quite stark indeed. And this doesn't necessarily mean that the triathlete is a bad swimmer, not at all. It just means that they're swimming in different environments.
When we're swimming in a mass start in a triathlon, swimmers are all really close together, shoulder to shoulder, on each other's hips, and in real tangled close proximity. And this doesn't bode well for having a lovely, beautiful pool-based swim stroke with a nice low arm recovery over the top of the water. Arms can clatter, you can even catch waves or choppy water with that arm.
So it's much more suitable to have a straight arm recovery when you're swimming in a triathlon-type environment. Now, that being said, this isn't something that I would suggest you just go away and try and learn, because an awful lot of pool swimmers have learned how to have that nice low arm carriage with their swim stroke from the outset. Then they learn to adapt into this pool stroke later on. This moves us nicely onto arm rate.
If you watch triathletes swim, you might notice they've got a very high cadence. This is entirely different to what you might see if you're used to watching swimming on the TV with nice, long, relaxed. stroke and this difference is down to the destruction of the water and the environment that athletes are swimming in. Couple of the fact that you can bump into other swimmers, you can find your stroke suddenly becoming dud for want of a better word.
What we mean is when you put your arm in the water to take your stroke, nothing happens or you lose propulsion completely because the water's really bubbly and turbulent or as I said, you might have got bumped by another swimmer. Whereas if you've got a long stroke, traditional pool stroke. This can really affect your stroke much more if you get bumped because there's an awful long time until that next swimming stroke coming along and that's where the high turnover of a triathlon based stroke can be much more applicable to the open water because it doesn't take long for that next stroke to come in and then bang you can get your propulsion from your stroke and keep moving forward. Now this doesn't mean I'm just suggesting you throw good technique out the window.
No, of course get those fundamentals of a proper pool stroke sorted first but by being able to adapt that stroke to heighten your turnover and get your cadence up that means that you'll be more equipped for the open water. Another area that is less obvious is with our breathing. Now, given the nature of open water swimming and the fact that we've often got athletes around about us all the time, it is really useful to be able to breathe as easily as you can to both sides.
Now, if we're in a pool environment, like this, well, we generally refer to this as bilateral breathing, but if you do watch a triathlon swim stroke, you'll see that athlete very often repeatedly just breathing to the one side. And I was very guilty of this when I raced. I would generally always breathe breathe to my right side.
And this is something that athletes do predominantly because you could be swimming alongside another athlete to the side of you that you don't want to breathe to. But also, you might find that in an open water environment you've got waves or chop coming in from one particular side so you want to be able to breathe away from that too and cope with it. And finally, because it's the open water and outside, there might be glare coming off of the sun. Now that's me talked a fair bit about the upper body, but what about the lower body and our kick? Well, you might well have observed when you're watching triathletes swim that they have got quite a low kick rate.
This is actually not something that is specific just to triathlon. We see it in long distance open water swimming as well. In fact, if we look at pool-based swimming, if you see the sprinters swim, they very much have high eight-beat leg kick.
This is not the same as a long distance swimmer who's going to have more of what we call a two-beat flutter kick. The reason for this is you're starting to preserve energy as the distances move on and the kick moves away from being more about propulsion to being about stability for your stroke. Now, we as triathletes are thinking about Half Ironman or an Ironman, a 3.8K is a long distance, but in swimmers, well, they can swim up to 10K, so I guess you've got to take that into account.
But let's not forget that we do have a bike and a run to come, and we do need to be able to preserve our energy. And finally, we also are swimming in a wetsuit, so that is able to lift our legs up and make it that bit easier to not rely upon our legs quite as much. Now a fairly obvious but necessary change that you will see in a triathlon swimstroke is the ability of an athlete to sight. Now this is really quite important in the open water because unlike in the pool we don't have a black line along the floor to follow and what we need to be able to do is see where we're going, our target which is usually the buoy that we're having to swim around and that means we're just going to have to lift our head up a fraction out of the water.
to see that target. Now not only do we need to be able to see that target or the buoy that we're swimming towards but we also need to be aware of other swimmers who are around about us. A, because we don't necessarily want to bump into them but B, because we want to be able to draft off of them and get on their feet.
So being able to sight is a really useful skill that triathletes need to be able to master and incorporate into their stroke. Which leads me nicely onto my final point which is drafting. Now, if you've come from a regular swimming background, the notion of swimming close beside somebody or even sitting right on their feet can, well, quite honestly seem criminal because we're quite used to leaving regular time gaps when we're swimming sets in the pool.
However, this is something that you really can't avoid in a mass swim start environment. In actual fact, there's quite a benefit to be had from sitting in somebody's hips or directly in behind touching feet. If you can get close enough, the wake that somebody creates that comes off of their hip is something you can in effect ride along from and get a benefit of.
Alternatively, you can literally sit directly behind a swimmer who is in front and tap their feet with your fingertips. Essentially, this acts like drafting on a bike. You're sitting in their slipstream for want of a better example.
Both of these examples can help you swim at the same speed but for considerably less effort. Or indeed, you can try to latch onto somebody who's swimming quite a bit faster than you and try and keep up with their pace, which is gonna be easier than you would have managed trying to do that on your own. Well there you go, there is clearly a handful of quite big differences that we can notice in a triathlete's stroke. And hopefully now you can get a grasp and understand why it is that they do that. But as I said already, I would advise getting the fundamentals right with a regular swimming pool stroke.
Amen. over time you can start to adapt that to be able to be more familiar with the triathlon environment. Hopefully you've enjoyed this video so please hit that thumb up like button, find the globe on screen to get all the other videos on the channel and if you want to see a video that Mark and Heather did where they compare open water swimming stroke to pool stroke well you can find that here and another video about top five swim skills, well you can find that here.