Team FLI training with Kevin part 2: The Pool

I'll start this week, by saying that when you ask about the best form or technique for swimming, you are going to get a lot of different and maybe conflicting answers. If you are new to swimming, ask your local lifeguard or swim instructor at the pool for a few pointers. Accept pointers from other swimmers and then use your mind and how it feels with your body to decide if you should adopt it into your training routine. For example, sometimes other swimmers ask me why I'm swimming a certain way and I explain that I've made modifications in order to make it more closely resemble what I do in the river and they say "oh, now I see", or sometimes their advise is something that can help me even though I have made some adjustments.

Swimming is great training for riverboarding and a lot of great competitors on the river have some background with swimming. If you're not a former swim team member, you can still get some benefit from it as a riverboarder, and even if your choice of face level sport is something other than riverboarding, it's great conditioning. The questions I ask and conclusions I make are geared toward racing as a riverboarder, but you can still benefit if you participate recreationally or in another face level activity.

One thing to consider is your hands and arms. Do you open your hands and keep them relaxed or keep them tight and pull more water with every stroke? Do you fully extend your arms and sweep almost straight down or allow a little bit of bend in your elbows and sweep across your torso as you finish the stroke? Keeping your hands open and coming across your torso will put the least amount of strain on your shoulders. Keeping your hands closed and getting a good long pull is probably getting the most you can with each stroke, but will also fatigue your shoulders very rapidly and possibly lead to overtraining and injury. For most of my workout, I keep my hands open and relaxed and sweep my arms across my torso a little at the end of the movement. I can train for a longer duration and/or more frequently by not over taxing my shoulders, yet if I never tax my shoulders at all, how can I expect them to hold up under stress during a race when I'm digging as hard as I can? Therefore, I choose to do just a little bit with closed hands (or while wearing webbed gloves) and really pull hard.

Should you train with or without fins? For those of us who spend a lot of time in the river, it is a good old fashioned butt kicking workout to swim without fins, so it's good training. However I like to keep my legs used to kicking with fins and my feet and ankles used to wearing fins. How much you do with or without fins is your call.

What about your legs? Doing the swimmers kick coming more from your thigh is most efficient in a pool, but a bent knee kick that comes from your lower leg is closer to how we swim in the river while wearing fins. Bending your knees will also cause your lower body to drop lower in the water; increasing drag and decreasing efficiency. You'll have to find the balance between knocking out more work efficiently and making things applicable even if a little less efficient way of getting from one side of the pool to the other.

Now onto frequency, tempo/speed, etc. How often should you train? Should you go nice and slow for a long time/distance or crank out sprints? An entire blog could be written about periodization, but in it's most simple definition, periodization is varying the intensity, duration, frequency, and overall focus of your training in cycles to achieve different goals. When it's early in the off season and quite a while before competitions, my training focuses on building strength and endurance, with just a little emphasis on speed. As I get closer to racing, I shift my training to focus on speed and endurance, with just a little focus on strength to maintain or continue to make small gains. That's what works for me; get stronger and fitter, then take that strength and train to make myself faster, and try to peak a few days before a competition.

Periodization can be used with the rest of your training and not just in the pool. Set your goals, take stock of how many weeks, days, workouts, etc you have from now until then, and then plan and train smart and hard to get there.

I hope that this blog session has asked some of the right questions, and that the answers you come up with will take further in your training.

happy when the training gets hellish because I know it's worth it,

Kevin,
Kevin is a Face Level Industries C.O.R.E. team rider and is also sponsored by Faveur clothing, Tooks headware, Mean Monkey riverboards, Six Six One protection, Freestyle watches, and Globe shoes.