(and what to DO about it!)
We have all been there as triathletes. You're a good bike / run athlete, and you came from another sport at which you excelled. During your WHOLE life athletics have offered you a simple equation: put in the time and get the reward.
Except it's not working with your swim.
You've watched a million YouTube videos (stop doing that). You've read books and performed drill after drill during your sessions. You've abandoned drills, exasperated, and just decided that you'll get faster through more training volume. Except that doesn't work either, and now your shoulders are injured.
You're especially tired of going to the pool and getting lapped by the 10 year-olds at swim practice next to you.
Are you thinking about abandoning swimming altogether, since it seems that no matter what you do you never get any better? Are you (gulp) considering becoming a duathlete?
Forgive us a short digression, but one thing we always tell athletes is that swimming is far more like golf than other endurance sports. Golf is almost all technique (although you should really try playing 18 holes before you say there isn't any endurance component to it), and golfers hone their skills through long, deliberate practice.
Any of you catch the crucial word in there?
Yeah, "deliberate." Most triathletes haven't been taught correct technique in the pool, so they resort to what they know best: slogging through hundreds of hours of pool time, hoping that simply by swimming more they will improve. We'd ask you to think about the golf analogy again, and maybe you've gone to a driving range before and experienced the unique frustration of hitting a ball badly again and again and again.
Do you think you'll become better at a skill by repeating a bad swing 1000 times? A million times?
Because that is precisely what you are doing in the pool if you don't know correct technique. You are simply repeating bad habits over and over.
That's right: your swim sessions may be making you a worse swimmer, not a better swimmer.
Swimming more may not help at all—it may actually slow you down AND injure you at the same time. But so many triathletes don't KNOW where to get help, so they remain mired in the worst stage of development: unconscious incompetence. They don't even know what they are doing wrong. Until you figure out what's holding you back, you'll stay stuck in place.
On the other hand, swimming shouldn't be about "trying to swim a perfect 25 before you swim any further." If you do that, your swim fitness will be so low that as soon as you try to swim a 100 (four lengths of the pool) you'll start to tire out and your form will begin to regress to your normal, flailing style. You need to swim correctly AND with enough volume.
Do either of the above images resonate with you? Do you feel that you've tried both swimming more and swimming less? In both cases, unless you are practicing deliberate improvement, you are unlikely to actually get any faster. In fact, as we jokingly suggest, both doing more and doing less will probably simply set you up for injury.
"If you're serious about improving your swimming speed, attending their swimming camp is a must! I tried receiving private swim lessons outside of Campfire, but I received no feedback on how to correct my form (mainly just to "swim more"). Just "swimming more" has not affected my speed at all over the past couple of months, but at Swim Camp the in-depth feedback + video analysis really pinpoint what you need to work to quickly fix your form!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!"
— Alex W.
The solution is getting a chance to see—with YOUR OWN eyes—what you are doing incorrectly, and then learning from our team of coaches about HOW to fix the problem through deliberate practice. The athlete at right is dropping her elbow during her catch and pull, but without video review she would never know that what she needs to do is to stop pressing down with hand and start bending her elbow more to get better purchase on the water.
At our swim camps, we always start first with capturing videos of you swimming, so we can review them and actually give you actionable drills and you can actually—FINALLY—start making progress in the water.
Once we have your footage, we give you a personalized video swim analysis with drill recommendations specific to you and your stroke alone. You have lifetime access to that video, so you can review it any time.
Here's a sample of the video analysis you'll get when you attend swim camp!
$495
At one of our two-day swim camps, you get the following:
The schedule below is just a sample of what's been done in the past, and will likely change due to pool hours, available facilities, and other factors. You will get a fully detailed schedule once our rental with the pool is finalized.
Day One
8:45 arrival, meetups
9am – 11am: Swim Session One: Fitness
11am-11:30am BREAK
11:30am – 1:30pm: CLASSROOM SESSION
1:30pm-2pm BREAK
2pm – 3:30pm: Swim Session Two: Technique
Day Two
8:45am arrival
9am – 11am: Swim Session Three
11am- 5pm: Individual Stroke Correction Sessions: 25 minutes with Chris. Signups for these will be available once I finalize pool details.
Once you know what you're doing wrong and you know how to fix it, you'll be swimming faster in no time. Even better, you'll be swimming more efficiently than ever, which means you will have more energy available for the bike and run legs of your triathlon, since, as the Australians say:
"Swim and bike for show, run for dough."
And not only will you swim more efficiently and faster, you may find yourself actually enjoying your swim training for the first time in your career.
How about the alternative?
Do you want to be slogging away in the pool, a year from now, not having gotten any faster, repeating the same mistakes all over again, vowing you'll get faster through more volume or (worse) giving up swimming altogether?
Only 15 so you can all get great attention during the two day camp.
Since I'm coming to you, I am guessing you already know where to stay.
You need to be able to swim at least 100 yards of freestyle without stopping to get a benefit from this camp. We can't teach people to swim at this camp, so if you cannot perform the above you won't get much out of camp.
Our refund policy for all camps is as follows:
Sign up below.
We get it, commitment to improvement is hard. If this next camp doesn't fit your schedule or your budget, leave us your email address so you'll know the next time we offer camp. Heck, after another year of non-improvement, we'll bet you'll be ready!
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