Open Water Swimming Skills You Can Practice In The Pool!

Swimming in the open water requires some specific skills that you don't ordinarily learn and practice in a swimming pool, but if you can't always swim in the open water, then how do you go about learning them? Today, I'm going to lend you a few of my tips and drills that I've always practiced in a swimming pool that will give you the edge in the open water. Okay, first one, simple one, it's called dead turns. It's got quite a sinister name and it's called that for a very good reason that I'll get onto shortly. Now, essentially, with this, you head into the wall to do a turn, a touch turn, a flip turn, tumble turn, however you normally do, but rather than touching the wall, we purposely turn a fraction earlier than we would ordinarily and therefore purposely miss the wall. As the name suggests, dead turns sucks the life out of that turn because by missing the wall, we then lose all that speed, all that momentum, and then we have to overcome that, we have to work harder, we have to kick our legs hard, work our arms harder to get that speed and momentum back up. That's recreating that experience you get in the open water by having to swim continuously without touching the wall, but also when you swim around buoy, you perhaps lose a little bit of speed around the buoy and then you have to work hard to get that speed and momentum back up coming up. Next one, a deep water skull start. This is literally just recreating the deep water skull start that you might experience at the beginning of an open water swim in a triathlon and various things. Now, for this, you just want to push off the wall slightly to perhaps the five-meter mark at the flags and you want to skull on the spot. Now, for this, you want to be horizontal in the water, so legs up behind you, hands out in front, skulling in the water, legs fluttering behind, and trying to stay stationary, but ready, poised and ready to go when the starter says to go, almost like you're revving the engine of the car with the brakes on. Now, when that starter says go, you want to kick your legs as hard as you possibly can. That is the quickest way to accelerate. You can move your legs far quicker than your arms. Get those legs kicking. No worries if there's a load of white water coming up behind you. Get going as quick as you can. Move those arms as quickly as you can. Do 10 strokes off hard and then stop and then go back and practice that over and over just until you've really nailed it and got used to it. This next one is a bit of a weird one, but we're going to put a tumble turn in partway down your length. You're going to swim down, you're going to do a full tumble turn and then carry on swimming in the same direction. Obviously, by doing that tumble turn, it's going to slow you down. You've then got to overcome that. You've got to get your speed and momentum back up, similar to the dead turns that we did at the start. Now, the reason these are really useful is that when we swim in the open water, our pace is up, down, we're having to change, have to get around other swimmers, around the boys. It's not quite as simple as that steady-state effort that you normally get when swimming in a swimming pool. You need to practice that. Otherwise, you'll find it quite alarming and a bit of a surprise when you do start swimming in the open water. Another very important skill for the open water is sighting, being able to see and know where you're going. You can actually practice sighting in the swimming pool too. Now, I appreciate you don't really need to because you've got the black line, lane ropes, the wall, and various things, so you know where you're going, but it's still a useful time to be able to practice that technique of sighting to make sure that you can sight without it affecting your stroke and slowing you down, and also to make sure that you are sighting and you're able to see where you're going. Now, you can put perhaps a bright kickboard at the end of the pool and make sure that you are actually seeing that each time you sight and not just going through the motions, or you can just simply sight a person on the side of the pool, whatever it may be. Now, you can, of course, set yourself a target as you do a rep of, say, 400 meters that you're going to sight three times every 100 meters. I personally will just quite often just sight as and when I like during a swim, just to mix things up, to escape that boredom. Next one, a bit of a fun one, the Australian exit. Now, the Australian exit is when you have to jump out partway through a swim in a triathlon around an obstacle, and then jump back in to finish the swim off. You can practice that in the swimming pool too. Perhaps next time you're doing some threshold reps, for example, you get out partway through one of your reps, you jump out of the pool around the block or around some obstacle on the side of the pool, and then you jump back in and finish off that swim rep. Obviously, whilst this does sound like a lot of fun, it is actually quite hard because if you are mid-threshold rep, your arms are obviously going to be quite tired, then you're asking them to get you out of the pool and then suddenly use your legs to run around some obstacle. It's harder than it sounds, so worth practicing. Obviously, with that, make sure that you do let a lifeguard know what you're planning on doing and that you don't run too fast on the pool deck so you don't slip and have any accidents. These next few are going to actually require a little bit more setup, some people to swim with, and probably with that actually making sure that you have lanes to yourself, see if a book door, a club session. First one is drafting other swimmers. Now, when you swim in the open water, you are naturally going to end up having to swim in close proximity to other swimmers, particularly within a triathlon event. That means other swimmers are going to be coming around you, perhaps even knocking you at times, and if you're not used to that, it can absolutely freak you out and that may actually end up affecting your swimming, making you more tense and slowing you down. The more you can practice that, the better. You can do that in the swimming pool. If you get other swimmers to swim with you, you can start swimming on their hips, on their feet, just getting them to swim around you and that will put you at ease. With that, you can also start to learn how to draft off them. A similar way to when cycling, when you start to slipstream another cyclist, you can actually do the same when swimming. You can swim on someone's hips and actually get a bit of a draft by almost surfing their wake to a degree and also by sitting on their feet. Try and practice this and the more comfortable and used to it you get, the better. Then a couple of follow-ons from that, that again, are definitely going to require people and well, definitely a lane or two that are booked just for yourselves. One of which is a mass start. Using that deep water start that I mentioned at the very beginning, we're now going to do the same, but with lots of people around us. Try and fit a few people into the width of the lane, sculling on the spot, maybe a few people in front and behind. Now, when you do that deep water start, you are going to experience that melee and washing machine effect that you can experience within or at the start of a triathlon. It's your goal to try and basically get as confident and used to that as possible. Yes, you're going to knock arms, they're going to get tangled, a stroke may get knocked away from you, but the more confident you get with that, the better. Then the final one is creating an open water swim course within a swimming pool. Now, this is definitely going to require at least a couple of lanes. You're going to have to take out the lane rope and if you can, pop something in the swimming pool that you can swim around. Now, it's a group force, but in a swimming pool so you can start trying out different tactics, swimming around people, how you draft, should you take the inside line, the outside line, round a buoy, all these little things, the more you can practice, the better you're going to be prepared for the open water. There we go. I hope you've enjoyed today's video. If any of these tips have been helpful, they're new to you, get involved in the comment section down below. Let me know what you think to them. If you've tried any of them before, again, let me know in the comment section down below. If you enjoyed today's video, make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any more of these videos. If you enjoyed it, give it a thumbs up, give it a like. Cheers.