Swim, Day 2

Working on getting back into swimming for the second day. I've decided to try to work up to 500m non-stop--but that is going to take a while. Today I did:

Swim: 10x ~50m (8x freestyle) in ~20min.

cool down: 8x strict open-hand pull-ups.

The breathing is improving but I feel that I don't have the right technique or pacing yet. I looked around a bit to see what I might be doing wrong and how to work on my breathing and I found a couple of things.

The suggestion is that you should breath out through your nose slowly during the full stroke but add breathing out with the mouth right as you are rotating to lift your mouth out of the water. This reduces the effect of the pressure difference between nose and mouth as you are breaking the surface and lets you fully exhale.

Speed and variance are effected by the number of strokes per breath. This study seems to suggest that the effects only matter for sprinting but I think that it suggests that you should try to avoid very high breathing rates.

I think the technique I'm most interested in developing is getting my mouth and nose up more vertical and a little back, which can be used in open water.


I'm going to try the breathing with side stroke tomorrow.



I'm going to work on building up to five strokes per breath. I mostly do three strokes per breath now to avoid dominant side bias and to slow the breathing rate (two is too fast). I think that mixing down to five will help me control the stroke rate too. If I am breathing less often I think I will be more inclined to moderate the stroke. I'll have to see how this works. It's clear that getting good shoulder rotation is important and I think that I'm probably not rotating enough. The correct breathing position appears to be almost completely on your side.



You can add a glide between the water entry and the beginning of the pull stroke. This helps with efficiency and slow down the overall stroke rate. It seems you want to keep the body straight (don't bend at the hip) when you rotate to breath.

Finally, I'm not sure about recover strokes but this techniques seems intuitive and interesting. Let the resistance of the water guide you in making an efficient recovery:


Interestingly, controlling breathing is also very important in Martial Arts so good breathing will hopefully help me there.

Also random other comments I ran across while looking. There was some discussion on the crossfit boards about how transferable swimming was to other activities. I think that the breathing and general strength requirements are definitely transferable but there is a lot of specific technique that you need to know to become really good. Clearly its a good life skill, but I'm going to see if I can find out more about transfer. Also, the discussion suggested that it helped lower resting HR. Not sure if this is true more than other high endurance activities but an interesting tidbit: one of the lowest resting HR recorded was Spanish cyclist Miguel Indurain (5x Tour de France winner) at 28bpm. Wow.