A simple strategy to help maintain your swim skills in races
While maintaining consistent speed and pace is key to a strong race swim, you also need to maintain excellent skills. Here's how…
Triathlon races are endurance races, and so a critical aspect of performing well is maintaining your performance throughout the race. While maintaining a consistent speed and pace is fairly obvious, what’s less obvious is the need to maintain excellent skills, particularly in the water.
And if you’re skills are slowly eroding over the course of a race, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to maintain your ideal pace. And the cost of doing so is going to get higher and higher.
Let’s take a look at a simple strategy to help you learn how to better maintain your skills in training so you can maintain them in races.
Training challenges
If you’re consistently practising in a way where your skills get progressively worse over the course of a training session, that’s how you’re going to train yourself to perform in a race!
Just like it’s easy to gradually slow your swimming pace if you’re not paying attention to your times or your pace, the same can happen with your skills. Simply relying on feel alone isn’t sufficient.
Most triathletes are aware of how to maintain a given intensity in their training sessions. However, they’re less aware of the importance of maintaining skillful movement as well, or how to do it.
You may be experiencing a significant loss in skill without even knowing it, and this is even more likely when you’re working hard.
A simple solution
One of the most effective ways to ensure that you’re being consistent with your skills throughout your training sessions is counting your strokes.
If you see that your lap times are getting progressively slower over the course of a set or session, you know something is off and something needs to change. You can use the same principle to keep track of your skills by counting your strokes.
Counting strokes is a measure of your technical efficiency. The more you’re taking, the less efficient you’re swimming.
While the goal is not necessarily to take as few as possible, if you notice that the number is climbing within a repetition or within a session, you know you’re losing efficiency. And if you want to get better at maintaining your skills in races, that’s exactly what you don’t want.
Let’s say you’re performing multiple 100m repetitions, and you notice that your stroke count goes up by two during the final 25m. The issue is that you’re losing efficiency after only 75m, and you’re likely going to be racing for much longer than that!
What’s great about counting strokes is that it lets you know right away when there is a problem, and that allows you to do something about it right away.
By counting your strokes, you can ensure you’re being consistent with your skills in training, which leads to technical consistency in racing.
Andrew Sheaff
Swim coach 
