top of page
Search
Andrew Sheaff

Triathlon Swimming Realities Part I


If you want to be successful in anything in life, you have to deal with reality. If you interact with how the world IS, you’re a lot more likely to accomplish your goals than if you interact with the world as you WISH it was.


I'm going to explore 3 realities of triathlon swimming that have a massive impact on your ability to improve your performance in the water.


These ideas may be of no surprise to you. They may seem like common sense. However, most triathletes tend to act as if they are NOT true, and end up making the fatal mistakes we’ll look at in the next section.


Not only do you need to accept these realities as true, you need to think about whether your ACTIONS reflect these realities. If you can change your action to align with reality, you WILL improve your swimming.


Reality #1. Most triathletes are inexperienced in the swim as compared to the bike and the run.


Most triathletes come to the sport from a running or cycling background, or not sports background at all! As a result, they arrive at triathlon without a swimming extensive background. This can create a problem. While running and cycling are ‘relatively’ intuitive skills, swimming tends to be very counter-intuitive.


On land, we’re used to dealing with gravity and solids. In the water, we’re dealing with fluids and a lot less gravity. Most people simply take what they’ve learned on land and apply it to the water.


It doesn’t work.


The other challenge is that water is a life-threatening environment. If you don’t stay afloat, you can die. Your brain is most certainly aware of this reality, whether consciously or unconsciously.


A HUGE aspect of the skill of swimming is simply getting comfortable enough so that the primitive parts of your brain are unconcerned with drowning. As a result, most triathletes tend to be uncomfortable in the water, and they tend to lack the skill required to swim quickly and easily.


Because of their inexperience in the water, most triathletes simply lack the skills of effective swimmers.


What's the biggest implication of this reality?


Your approach to the sport of swimming needs to be fundamentally different than the sport of triathlon. You need to focus on skill development more than anything else if you want to improve your performance.


Here's a simple step to put into action.


Stop training in the water and start practicing. Sooner than later, your swimming performances will begin to improve rapidly.


Much more on this to come in the future.


FASTER. EASIER. BETTER.


Andrew

Recent Posts

See All

コメント


Post: Blog2_Post
bottom of page