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A new triathlete or an experienced one who’s stuck in a swimming rut can learn some valuable lessons from the golf-swimming comparison.  A golfer who truly wants to improve at the sport doesn’t just walk up to the first tee and swing away.  Instead, he spends time on the driving range and the practice green tweaking his technique with every club in his bag.  If he’s really serious, he pays a teaching Pro to watch him in order to give him feedback on his swing.  If you want to improve, you have to spend time isolating different parts of the game so you can practice them in a controlled environment, because simply swinging harder at a golf ball will not make it go farther or straighter most of the time.  In swimming, simply pulling and kicking harder might make you go faster for a few meters, but don’t plan to keep that pace for a whole triathlon swim split.     

There are a couple of different ways to approach your swim training.  You can hop in the pool and swim straight through a couple thousand meter workout without so much as stopping to check the pace clock.  Will doing this workout raise your conditioning level?  Maybe. Do some people enjoy staring at the black stripe on the bottom of the pool go by for hours on end?  I personally don’t, but I’m sure there are plenty who do.  Will this workout make you faster?  Maybe slightly.  But you will reach a plateau and stagnate.  The reason is that there’s more involved in efficiently moving your body through water than just brute force.  The best way to gain speed is to improve your efficiency; the best way to improve your efficiency is by treating pool sessions as “practices” rather than “workouts.”  That is, you should break down your stroke into manageable parts and practice them individually at a nice, easy pace rather than knocking out huge yardage with less-than-perfect form.  In fact, grinding out long workouts with poor form will turn that form into an ingrained habit making it even more difficult to learn good form later!  Even the fastest of swimmers can make gains concentrating on form—they can work on speed through Aerobic and Anaerobic sessions, but still work on their form in their warm up and Cool Down sets to ensure they continue to swim correctly. 

That said, you have to practice whole-stroke swimming too at some point in order to build the Endurance required to make it through a triathlon swim.  To keep tabs on how your efficiency is improving, going back to the original theme, play golf.  To “play golf” swim 50 yards or meters and count your strokes.  Every time you put either arm in front of your head, that’s one stroke.  Add that number to your time in seconds to come up with your score.  For instance, 40 strokes in 45 seconds equals 95.  Your score is an indicator of how efficient you are. The lower the number, just like in golf, the better you’re doing.  In terms of proficiency, the scores are roughly equivalent as well.  If you’re above 100, you should spend more time on working on skills and drills both on the golf driving range and in the pool.  If you’re below 70, you’re near the top of the leader board.    

Use this little game throughout the year to take a quick snapshot of how well you’re swimming.  During your swim workouts (practices), throw in a set of 3 or 4 golf laps to check to see if you’re swimming efficiently.  Swim at approximately your race pace for your next scheduled event and calculate a golf score.  Then, focus on your form and try to minimize your strokes per Lap.  If you are able to take off 4 strokes, but your time increases by 4 seconds, your golf score remains unchanged.  That is, your overall swim split in the tri will be slower, but you should be less fatigued which should allow you to make up that time on the bike and the run.  Another useful application is to swim a golf lap immediately after practicing a particular drill.  The intent is to objectively measure how well you’ve incorporated the lessons learned from the drill into your overall stroke.  Ideally, over the course of the season, both the number of strokes and the number of seconds should come down indicating that your efficiency is going up!   

Just remember, you don’t improve your position in the results by trying to get “fast” in the water.  You move up by training your body to hold a faster pace longer.  In other words, you improve your efficiency.  To do that in the pool, train like a golfer.  Just leave the goofy pants at home!

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