March 13th, 2012Welcome!
Welcome to Say YES! to Life Swim’s first blog post. Our motto is “discover the joy of swimming.” Our blog is for those who already love open-water swimming, as well as those who want to experience it for the first time. Our readership includes both open-water novices and experienced triathletes.
Our blog will:
- Supply hints and tips to improve your open-water swimming.
- Update you about Say Yes! to Life’s scheduled swims.
- Provide information about open-water swimming around the world.
OPEN WATER SWIM TIPS
Here is some provocative information from Paul Newsome, head coach at Swim Smooth in Australia:
As an open water swimmer or a triathlete you should be training as a distance swimmer, looking to develop your fitness for best performance over distances of 800m and longer.
There are two classic mistakes swimmers make:
- In their training sets they perform short very fast swims with lots of recovery. (Masters teams commonly use this sort of set.) A set might be 15x 100m with 45 seconds recovery.
- They do not train for fitness at all, believing that stroke technique is all important. While stroke technique is very important in swimming, you need to be able to sustain your technique over longer distances.
Here is a relevant workout for open-water swimmers:
8x 200 yds with 20 seconds recovery between each
16x 100 yds with 10 seconds recovery between each
(Notice the short recoveries between repetitions, meaning such a set might be best described as ‘relentless’!)
Thank you, Paul—you’ll get us all swimming longer sets in the pool in preparation for our open-water swims.
Happy swimming from us all at Say Yes! to Life Swims.
