- How to Swim Faster
- How to Start Running Today
- Heavy Legs or The First Signs of Overtraining
- Swim Fast to Get Fast
- 3 Essential Open-Water Survival Tips
I have this talk every few months with athletes new to swimming. They ask: "How do I get faster?" I usually give them a generic answer—and then a specific one.
The generic answer is: dedication, persistence and consistency. That goes well on a poster board for a motivational speech, but hardly gives you a plan of action. People want specifics!
The specific answer is: technique, training time (volume) and workout structure (intensity). You can view these as a triangle. Technique goes at the top because without at least a moderate amount of good swimming technique, training time and workout structure will only help a bit.
To illustrate, imagine someone who barely understands front crawl or freestyle. He can swim every day (high volume) with detailed workouts with varying effort intervals (good structure). This will improve his overall cardiovascular fitness and muscular strength. But this swimmer will quickly hit a limit on improvements to speed because of poor technique. In swimming, it is very easy to use a lot of energy and make very little forward progress.
I am sure some of you reading this have already figured that out.
How to Start Running Today
According to Running USA, an organization that tracks national trends, the number of women who finished a running race soared from 791,000 in 1987 to 4.4 million in 2007. Why the attraction?
In a poll of 8,000 runners by the same organization, women said they run to sculpt a toned physique, stave off stress, and achieve personal goals. And those are just a few of running's many benefits.
But perhaps what draws people to the sport more than anything is that everyone can do it. You don't need special skills, pricey gear, athletic ability, or even good genes. All running requires is a pair of shoes and a little determination. Still, it can be intimidating, so we came up with this failproof plan to get you started and keep you on track.
Heavy Legs or The First Signs of Overtraining- by Chris ‘Macca’ McCormack
Very much by feel. Fatigue is something you know you are suffering and over the years I have been able to become very honest with myself and know when I am being just plane lazy or when my body is screaming out for rest. I think this honestly has been the primary reason for my longevity in career. By knowing what your body needs and then understanding how it responds, you get to, slowly over time, get a feel for your body rhythms and determine when you are starting to push the envelop too much. This becomes critical as you age as your body does not recover as quickly as it did when it were younger. Being confident enough to let it go and say, that is enough for today, and then not question that decision is the key. Guilt is what can hurt you more if you can’t learn to have this ability to say enough is enough when your training.
Swim Fast to Get Fast
By Gale Bernhardt For Active.com
I completely agree that doing form drills to practice good swimming technique is critical to the process of becoming a faster swimmer. That written, you cannot expect that slow and purposeful drills will increase your sustained swimming speed if you never swim fast.
Leer más: Swim Fast to Get Fast
3 Essential Open-Water Survival Tips
By Nick White Triathlete magazine
Last summer, one of my athletes felt great going into the water at the start of her goal event, a half-Ironman at Buffalo Springs Lake in Lubbock, Texas, only to get stuck behind a pack of slow swimmers.
A gap formed between her group and the leaders, but by the time she fought her way into open water she didn't have the power to get across to them. And while she ended the day with a new PR, her experience in the water revealed an opportunity for even more improvement. She needed some surge power and a more aggressive outlook on swimming in the pack.Pack swimming is a relatively infrequent experience for most athletes, and it's difficult to replicate in a pool. Sure, you can swim laps right on someone's feet or hip, but there's little that compares to being smack in the middle of a few hundred swimmers out in open water.
So, without much opportunity to practice this skill, here are some tips for staying out of trouble.
