Four Open Water Swim Skills for Triathletes

Swimming is a complex sport with (literally) many moving parts. Add the chop and dead spots of open water it becomes more complex! Many dedicated triathletes spend hours in the pool only to see their race swim times hardly improving.  It’s frustrating to figure out what exactly to change to become faster. So you spend more time swimming, ultimately building more fatigue rather than the fitness you want, and nothing changes. More swimming is not the answer. Improving your technique will give you better results. Start with these skills.

According to Joe Friel, expert endurance coach and author of the Triathlete’s Training Bible, the four main skills you need to master to become a faster, more efficient open water swimmer are:

• Posture
• Direction
• Length
• Catch

These skills are referred to as PDLC. If you are already swimming well, it’s likely that you have a few of these skills already nailed. However, it’s a good idea to circle back to the basics from time to time. Ask a friend to take a video of you swimming from the side and front (both on-deck and underwater if possible), so you know which skills to work on.

Posture

Great posture starts with your head position. Unless turning your head to breathe, your eyes should be focused down and not forward. There’s a temptation to lift the head which causes the legs to sink, increasing drag – a bad habit that slows you down considerably. According to the Florida Gators swim coach, “for every one inch you lift your head, your hips sink three inches.”

To improve your posture:

1. Point your nose towards the bottom of the pool, and when you breathe, the nose points to the side of the pool (not the front or corner). The water line will break at the top third of your head (near the hairline).
2. Imagine a metal pole running through the top of your head down through your spine as you rotate, maintaining a stable head position throughout the stroke.
3. Find a relaxed tension with shoulders back and a neutral spine. Think of gliding along the surface like a superhero. Pulling your belly button in, and gently squeeze your glutes (think plank), but don’t overdo it – you are a relaxed tension superhero.

Play around with different head positioning to find what works best for you. You can video yourself on the deck and in the water to assess your positioning and try this on-deck drill before you jump in.

On deck drill for posture: Stand on deck, bent over at the waist, with your nose pointed down while you reach out to take a stroke through the air. Repeat this on-deck drill before each swim practice to ingrain it.

And just as you go faster in the aero position on the bike, you will swim faster with great posture.  A head-up posture also restricts air intake and puts stress on your neck and muscle shoulders. So there’s much to be gained with this simple fix.

Direction

When your hands enter the water, they should point in the direction you want to go. It’s that simple.

Many triathletes cross their arms over the midline. This is like running on a line with your feet crossing over the line on each landing – incredibly inefficient (and painful!), yet many triathletes swim like this, essentially snaking their way through the water.

The hand should enter in front of the shoulder, not the head.  Many who make this mistake have no idea they are crossing over because the bad habit feels natural. Again, take a video!

Drills to master direction

• On-deck direction drill: Stand bent over at the waist with a proper head posture and slowly reach out with one arm in front of your shoulder as if taking a stroke. Pick up to see where your hand is. It should be in front of your shoulder and not crossing over. You can also do this with a training partner: Bend at the waist and take a stroke through the air.  Withuot looking up have a training partner correct your hand and arm position. Once corrected, try it again slowly to see if you can put it back in the same corrected position. Repeat several times on both sides.

Take this skill to the water with this drill:

• The penguin drill: Swim while trying to put your hands and arms wider than your shoulders on entry.  Many triathletes who previously had crossover, find that their hands now enter in front of the shoulders, as they should.  If this is what you find, the fix is easy – swim the penguin drill all the time. It will feel weird for a few workouts but you will adapt soon.

Length

Efficient swimmers have a long, narrow stroke, from fingertips to toes. Improving length starts with your out-of-water arm reach, which should be similar to what you looked like raising your hand in 4th grade! Give it a try.  Raise your hand like you don’t really want to be called on – shoulders are level, no rotation. Now, raise your hand like you know the answer! Note how one shoulder elevates and your body becomes long and narrow.  A long reach in the water will set you up for a beautiful rotation.

Drills to improve length

• On-deck direction drill: stand on-deck with your toes a few inches from a wall. Keep one arm at your side and reach up with the other arm and place the hand on the wall, repeating as if you were doing a slow swim stroke. Note the rotation of your hips and shoulders.  Next, do the same thing, but make it bigger – reach as high as you can, and get as long and narrow as possible by standing on your tip toes. Don’t look up and keep a neutral spine (remember posture). Notice how your shoulders and hips rotate.

Grab your pull buoy and try these two drills in the pool

1. The slap drill. Swim at a moderate pace, and on the recovery reach out long and then slap the water as you enter. Your arm should be fully extended as you slap (like you threw a ball). This encourages proper rotation and length. Be aggressive with the swing and slap.
2. Belly-to-the-wall drill. Think about pointing your belly button toward the side wall on each stroke, alternating left and right walls. Keep your normal breathing pattern. You should are essentially rolling from side to side with your hand way out in front with each stroke.

Once you have mastered the long stroke, you won’t be slapping and rolling quite so much – these exaggerated movements are only to help you learn.

Catch

Traditional freestyle technique often teaches swimmers to put the hand in the water near the head and glide the arm through the water like you’re putting on a sleeve.  If you learned this as a child and are a successful swimmer, good for you! But, if you’re like many triathletes and started swimming later in life, this can be tough to grasp. Common drills like fingertip drag or zipper drill try to develop this technique and encourage the important high elbow. While not wrong, these techniques require a great deal of flexibility and are also typically inefficient for open water.

The biggest problem with the traditional hand entry and reach is that it eventually puts the wrist higher than the elbow.  Friel calls this “the death move” because you are then dead in the water. (Click here to hear Joe talk about the death move). A great deal of skill, technique and flexibility is required to get a great pull once the elbow has dropped below the hand. Maybe you’ve experienced how weird/hard it feels to get to a high elbow pull with a traditional hand entry.  The death move is why it feels so hard.  So, before you think of high elbow, think of a high hand.

Watch a professional triathlete and note their open water high hand recovery and long reach over the water. These two techniques set you up for a great catch because as soon as the hand enters the water the palm is already facing the back wall instead of the bottom of the pool.

Drills to improve catch

• On-deck direction drill: Stand bent over at the waist with both arms at your side. Take a stroke with one arm while keeping the elbow straight and reach. The shoulders should tilt during the stroke to maximum length.  As the arm is reaching its full extension point the fingers down at the deck. You now have the catch. Pull back. Slowly repeat this several times on deck with each arm so that you start to ingrain the skill. Use video and training partners to ensure your fingertips are pointing down. Now get into the water.

Friel offers a position reinforcement you can do when you are back in the water. “If your pool has starting platforms reach up with both hands and place your palms on the platform. That’s the catch position and you can use it to lift your body up a bit out of the water as though you were going to get out of the pool. Feel the power you can generate from this position. Now point your fingers towards the sky or ceiling instead of putting them on the platform. It’s obvious there’s no way you can lift yourself out of the water without putting your hands on the platform. It’s the same when you swim. There’s no way you can propel yourself forward in the water with your fingers pointing straight ahead at the wall. You must catch the water to go forward.”

• Windmill drill: With a straight arm, swinging high over the water, reach out much as you did with the slap drill.  Only instead of slapping the water, point your fingers down in order to create a catch (see picture below).  You should have good posture, be reaching in the direction of the forward wall, and have tilted shoulders with a slight hip roll as you catch the water. Once you have mastered the windmill drill along with posture, direction, and length, then you’ll be swimming faster than when you used to.

Putting it all together

Of the three triathlon disciplines, swimming is unique in that performance is largely determined by technique rather than fitness. Not to say that swim fitness is not important because the more you swim, the more you can improve technique. However, the opposite is also true – the more you swim with poor technique, the more you reinforce bad habits. So use these basic drills and skills to ensure that you are swimming efficiently and watch your race times drop!

TIPS TO MAKE THE MOST OF DRILLS

• Mix drills with swim to apply what you’re working on to your regular stroke. You may swim six strokes with closed fists, six strokes regular – or do 25 drill, 25 swim.
• Get feedback from your coach, a trusted swimming buddy or by video. Doing drills improperly is counter-productive.
• Take enough rest. Drills are technical skill builders. Take the appropriate rest to master the new skill.  Use recovery weeks to dig into technique. 
• Know the purpose. Drills exaggerate parts of the swim. i.e. side kick drill has you at a 90° rotation but an effcient freestyle rotation is closer to 35-45°. Understand what the drill is (and is not) trying to teach so you don’t implement a new bad habit.
• Drills are only effective if they are used to help you swim better. Don’t waste time practicing skills that don’t apply to open water triathlon swim – i.e. extensive kick sets or mastering the flip turn will not help you much on race day!

Reference Material: The Triathlete’s Training Bible 4th Ed. by Joe Friel.