Controversial Takes on Improving Swimming
A Slightly Uncomfortable Truth About Swim Training for Triathletes
Here’s a slightly controversial opinion on swim workouts:
If you are an amateur triathlete and swimming fewer than four times per week, it is probably not worth your time to practice strokes other than the one you will use in your race — freestyle (front crawl).
Not “mostly freestyle.”
Not “freestyle plus some backstroke for balance.”
Freestyle.
Why Pool Swimmers Can Do This (and Triathletes Can’t)
Pool swimmers can afford to practice multiple strokes because they have to race multiple strokes. They’re in the water five to six days per week and have the hours required to build endurance, speed, and technique across all four strokes.
Triathletes are playing a different game.
Most triathletes spend the majority of their training time biking and running. That usually leaves only two to four swim sessions per week — often closer to two than four.
The Math That Actually Matters
If you’re swimming three times per week:
One to two sessions are devoted to building different pillars of the endurance engine
One session is fully technique-focused
That means the number of meters you have available to meaningfully improve technique is small.
Those meters are valuable.
They should be spent either:
Honing your freestyle pacing “gears” (low / medium / high, or whatever zone structure you use), or
Honing technique — un-learning bad habits that increase drag and have built up over years, and integrating new movement patterns that improve efficiency
When swim frequency is low, every length of the pool is precious, and every length should be doing something that actually pays off on race day.
“But I’ll Get Bored”
If this approach starts to feel monotonous and you just need a mental break, that’s fine. Do a little backstroke or breaststroke for fun.
Just don’t pretend it’s neutral.
A 400 m backstroke set is 400 m that could have been spent working on freestyle entry, catch, pull, timing, recovery, rotation, or breathing. And if we’re being honest, most adult triathletes could improve at least one of those tomorrow.
What Every Swim Session Should Include
Every swim session should:
Start with a proper warm-up
Include at least one drill set — even on endurance or speed-focused days
And if it’s an endurance or speed session, that drill should target the technical issue that has been giving you the most trouble in recent weeks, not a random drill added for variety.
Film Doesn’t Lie (Even When It’s Uncomfortable)
Seeing yourself on film is the single best way to improve swimming — assuming you also have a coach who can break down that footage and tell you which movement patterns to change, whether those changes are big or small.
Your perception of what you’re doing and what you’re actually doing are rarely the same.
There Is No Single Path to Better Swimming
Every athlete’s path to improvement is different. There is no one prescribed order.
Yes, it’s common to focus on body position and drag reduction before propulsion. But in practice, a change in one of these areas can cause issues in the other to resolve themselves without addressing them directly.
Coaching Is Experimentation, Not Just Drills
Good coaches experiment.
Sometimes a coach who has been coaching triathlon swimming for 35 years — and has an uncle who’s a tuna and a sister who’s a dolphin — can spot a stroke issue instantly and know exactly what will fix it.
For the rest of us (and for the record, I’m 35 as I write this), improvement usually comes from testing different cues: visual, verbal, conceptual, or tactile. Sometimes a cue triggers the change you want immediately. Sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, the coach has to shift approach.
This is why barking instructions from the deck isn’t always the thing that fixes swim technique.