Intro swimmer help

I am in the same boat. I started swimming in Jan. and it took two weeks to feel any kind of comfortable. I can now do 100's without stopping and I feel like I will be able to do 200's by the end of next week. I have to disagree with your friend. Pushing yourself harder when you are not comfortable will not help. When I started I would do 25 yards and stop to rest. Then I got to where I could do 50's and so on.

It will take some time. The best thing to do is swim the distance you can do. The longer distances will come over time. Good luck.

Thanks for the reply, question to you: how many times per week are you in the pool? And are you just swimming lengths to work on endurance, or are you doing form drills as well?

I think your friend is doing you a disservice.

I would suggest that you get some lessons, join a masters swim, or at least watch lots of swimming videos of drills, good swim technique, etc. Try http://www.badig.com/or http://www.goswim.tv/

As for a typical workout, when I was just starting and could barely swim 2 laps, our coach had us warmup with 200yds of freestyle (sometimes only 100 or 150 for the people that were really struggling.) Then we did drills, usually about 600-1000 yds. At the beginning it was lots of kick on side type drills (TI extension drills), later we added stroke drills. It was always drill up, swim back (practicing what you learned in the drill.) The drill and swim were both done slowly to focus on achieving good form. After the drills, we did a main set (something like 4x100) trying to incorporate what we learned in the drills. Then a short cool down (usually 100 breast or back.)

The only thing that has changed for me now that I'm a better swimmer is that my coach has me doing different types of drills, and the yardage is much longer and he tells me exactly how long to rest between sets.

ETA: We swam 3x/week when we were starting out.

Edited by lodewey 2010-02-13 9:41 AM

How are you breathing?   If you are in decent cardio shape and you are winded after 1 lap, i wonder if you've been taught to breathe properly.    You aren't holding your breath when your head is underwater are you?   Are you exhaling slowly while your face is under?

I definitely am in good enough cardio shape to swim a 50.  Ran the NYC marathon and November and have kept up on the ground since than. 
I'm exhaling in the water, but I notice that I'm really forcing my breath out fast to get out to my next breath. 

Off to the pool right now, will adhere to these tips so far, and will report back.  Thanks everyone

I was in the same boat last April when I started.  My "breakthrough" took a long time, but I'm in my mid fories and never swam a lap in my life.  I went 3x per week for 5 months before it clicked.  Getting a coach really helped as did lots of laps with a pull buoy.  When I was starting, I would swim a lap or two without the buoy and be out of breath like you, then grab the buoy (with no rest) and do a couple laps (and get my breath back), drop the buoy, grab the buoy, etc.  I don;t use the buoy anymore but it helped me get the feeling of swimming level.

All in all it was a very humbling experience.

It is indeed a humbling task.  I spent 40 minutes in the pool today and did a few laps without the buoy, the majority with.
There were a few corrections that were pointed out to me with my stroke: one being that my fingers were spread, which should be common sense, but that helped a ton.  The second being that I was not bending my elbows during the 'pull' part of my stroke.  So I feel like I learned a bunch today, I was expending less energy, and felt myself gliding more through the water than I was forcing myself.

I think you could benefit a lot from total immersion. See if your local library has it, or google some youtube videos. The site used to have videos as well, but I don't see them anymore.

based on these 2 things you worked on today along with your first post, I think that you need to work more on being balanced front to back. You can tweak your pull and your fingers all you want, but when you take the pull buoy away, you'll still be dragging yourself through the water with sinking hips and legs. LEarn proper body position first so you are not fighting the water, then you can worry abou the finer details.

Good luck.

I really like www. swimsmooth.com  They have tips for all levels of swimmers and this cool animated swimmer with great form.  You can look at hi from all angles at all speeds and it really helped me understand what all the written swimming tips really meant.

No offense to your friend, but don't listen to them.  Swimming success is based a lot on form, and if you just muscle through it like they said, then your form will completely fall apart.  Then you'll be swimming incorrectly and inefficiently, thus making it even harder on yourself.

Like the others said, find a training plan, get your form down, and persevere.  Good luck!

Pump the brakes for a second-I am the friend and roomate "pushing" Brandon too hard. Just spoke with our other roomate about this with Brandon here and thought I had to defend myself.

DOC (BRANDON)- My message to you is as follows (which I could yell down the hall and tell you but I would rather do it on a public forum): YOU SIMPLY ARE NOT GOING TO GET BETTER BEING IN THE POOL FOR AN HOUR AND DOING 500 YARDS. You can't sit at the end of the pool for 5 minutes between 50yd sets, and you can not stop in the middle of a 25yd length and walk you just won't get the volume that you need.

As for coaching I'm not the best at it but I do have a solid swimming background have been working with Doc on the basics so he can build a solid foundation. A month ago he literally could not swim, like could not make it 25 yards. Now he can do 50s and he will continue to progress with some more research as suggested and if he'd like a swimming lesson from someone who is probably better suited to do so. But he will get better if he puts the work in.

Doc-Remove yourself from your comfort zone-"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it."

You know what Paulie? You're right, I just assumed he had given us the facts and I forgot that sometimes what a person says and what the other person hears are two different things.
 

So yeah, if you're stopping in the middle of a lap, or resting 5 minutes between laps, you need to HTFU. I can't think of any reason (unless someone was incredibly out of shape) that they should be resting more than a minute max between sets. And really, most swim workouts have you resting 10-30 seconds, depending on what type of a set it is. You have to learn how to push yourself past your perceived limits (see my sig line.)

Edited by lodewey 2010-02-13 8:09 PM

This is insane, as the third roommate and voice of reason between Harry and Lloyd here. I must throw my two cents into the mix. First cent, Brandon a.k.a Doc, count and record your distance because having a benchmark to gauge progress is essential. Plus you have this great website to keep track of everything.

Numero duce, schedule one workout during the week to devote to increasing your distance per set. Done right, in small increments, this will benefit you tremendously. As Pauliewalnuts mentioned, comfort zone. We need to get you comfortable with being uncomfortable...

And yes, for all of you wondering we do have three trainers set up in our living room...

 



Edited by jschauer1 2010-02-13 8:26 PM

I need to show that to my wife.  She is not happy with one.

Hmm... I'm a beginner too, and when I just pushed myself harder in the pool, I became frustrated, and wanted to just quit. I too can run, and am in good cardiovascular shape. Swimming was just like learning a foreign language. After I took three individual lessons from a great instructor, I became more efficient with my body in the water, and now know how to move smoothly. It's still tough though. It's been three months, and I'm still working on it. Lessons from a coach or instructor would help. Work smarter, not harder with this one. Work harder once you have a better idea of good technique. You don't want to learn something and practice it wrong.

x2

The thing that works best for me is to try and swim as SLOW as possible.  Most beginners try to swim way too fast. 

X3
You have to swim slow at first.  Don't rush to the wall or else you'll never be comfortable.  Look at the bottom of the pool and pretend your snorkeling or something.

x3 Don't work on speed until you can feel comfortable in the water. Incidentally, I'm in your same situation - just a bit farther along. Bike= great, run= fine. Swim= El Sucko Grande. I had never swam to go anywhere, ever, before tris. I played in the pool with my friends. I waterskiied at the lake. My high school didn't have swim team. So I needed to learn to swim laps.

My swim instructor for my first tri said that he got lots of new triathletes who were good runners and good cyclists who couldn't swim to the end of the pool. He said that swimming is just different. Your muscles have to figure out how to deal with the pressure of the water and use oxygen better/differently. You're using your whole body more, and the breathing is more regulated than just panting up a hill. Add in stress of new uncoordinated activity. I'm sure he explained it much better than that.  It does seem a lot different.

Anyway, keep at it. Eventually, it will click. You'll be able to breathe, swim and do continuous laps. Probably not super fast at first, but at least it'll come together.  Then you can work more on speed.

Regarding pushing yourself, try decreasing your rest time incrementally. Think about it this way: if you were running intervals out on the track, you'd run, walk, run, walk etc. until you were done with your intervals. Toward the end of your workout, your HR wouldn't go down very much during the walk portion. Same with the swimming. Don't rest at the end until your HR comes totally down. It doesn't need to. If you're waiting a full minute now, try to do three or four lengths with only 20-30 seconds at each end. Then take your minute if you have to. Repeat. You'll get more comfortable with your effort level feeling "too high".

My swim instructor also told me to just go ahead and breathe on one side every time that arm came out of the water until I felt stronger with my stroke. Not to try the "breathe every third or fifth stroke" or whatever yet. (Not that I even could wait for the fifth stroke - GASP! LOL)  There would be time to learn bilateral breathing later. There are many opinions on this though. For me it was easiest to get my breathing set on one side first. There are so many things to think about doing right that I had to draw the line for myself somewhere.

Good luck to you! It will get better.

Thanks to everyone who's posted, including my pushy roommates.  I'll take all of your tips to the water with me, and will continue to work on my form and will include endurance workouts into the mix.  I'm new to swimming, not training in general...so I'm not just jumping into the pool with no idea what on how I'm going to progress.  Pauliewalnuts did compare swimming to golf (which i'll probably never play again because i'll be training): there are so many pieces that have to be put together properly before you have a nice stroke.  So it's a lot to think about. 

A public message to my roommates:
Jay - since you're a master workout planner...can you develop a swim program for me to work on endurance?
Paulie - thanks for chastising me on a public forum instead of screaming at me while i sat on the couch...crying into my pint of ice cream.

This is hilarious guys!  You must be a blast to hang out with!

There are a million threads on this site about this topic.  They can all be summarized as "you get better at swimming by working on technique first, then after that's solid, you put in the miles and hours, not the other way around."

Pushing a beginner swimmer to just HTFU usually doesn't end well.  They either get frustrated and quit, or they injure their shoulders because they pushed too hard while swimming with bad form.  If the two of you who are "pushy roommates" are experienced swimmers, then you know this, unless you're so experienced that you learned how to swim efficiently when you were 10 years old, and now you swim well without giving it any conscious thought.  If you're not accomplished swimmers, then you are doing him a disservice by pushing him to rip his arms off instead of encouraging him to work on technique more.

Brandon, your "pushy roommates" are right in that you need to work hard at it.  It's not easy, and it's going to take a while to get better.  It's not going to improve just by swimming a lap or two, resting a few minutes, then repeating.  It's going to take months of hard work.

In any event, I've seen a lot of people go from complete beginners to MOP swimmers in oly distance races after 4 months of training.  The way they were coached was to do workouts that amounted to 15-20 minutes of drills for a warmup focusing on technique while ignoring the clock, followed by a main set of about 30 minutes of short distance swims on an interval appropriate for their abilities (ex: 50's on 2:00 or 100's on 3:00 or 3:30, whatever is right for you to maintain your pace on every one and get 15-25 seconds rest), all followed by a 5-10 minute cool down of easy swimming.  Total workout time approximately 1 hour of continuous work totaling 1,000-2,000 yards, but not all hard physically.  Only the main set is hard.  The drills while warming up make you a better swimmer.  The main set makes you a stronger swimmer.  Swimming well requires both.

Edited by TriMyBest 2010-02-14 8:12 AM

Have you read this thread yet too?  Can never have too much info in your head to not figure out what your doing wrong, lol!

Like others said, its not about pushing harder against the thick medium, its about going easier to get faster.

Swim with some fins for a bit.  You'll naturally learn how to reduce the resistance during the glide by going faster than you normally do.  I learned this one day several years back snooping in on a swim clinic at one of my kids swim meets.

All true and great information, but at the end of the day it takes time. Be patient and stick to the basics, you do not need an elaborate program. Make sure each workout has a purpose, whether its form, endurance or speed/force. Include the following in all workouts, warm up, drills (kick board, pull buoy, flippers etc) complete a main set if there is time and a quick cool down. As long as all remains constant you will increase your stamina and feel more confident in the pool.

Start with the mental aspects, envision long smooth strokes (that's what she said) and have some confidence. Once you get through that first open water swim and you experience a panic attack you will be fine.

Above all write it down, when you record workouts utilize the blog feature to describe thoughts/feelings/emotions. Finally, please keep the ice cream out of the pool and leave it for the cold showers.