Week 3 of 8: Why Being The Leader of Your Pack is Better Than Following The Flock
In Summary (TL;DR)
This is Week 3: be a leader
Drafting is a great way to race, but not to train
Leading one lane “down” is much better than following one lane “up”
Now that you've set your benchmark, and you've dedicated some focus to setting a realistic consistency initiative, let's look at some basic habits that you can start to grow as part of your plan for long-term and continual improvement.
So here goes for Week 3: leadership
Guidance
Simple pointers for all swimmers, triathletes and their coaches
Our last survey showed that 46.7% of you identify as a triathlete. A further 24.3% of you claim that you are an open-water swimmer. So, even if you're one of those pure swimming types who crinkles their nose at the triathlete on a seemingly endless training mission, a whopping 71% of you swim regularly in an environment that legally allows you to draft behind another swimmer if you want to.
And you should. When you race.
Drafting effectively has been shown to save you up to 38% of your energy expenditure, which means it's a brilliant tactic for either swimming further easier, or to up your game and swim faster.
Whilst specificity is a key component to a good training program, don't confuse thinking you're specifically training for an open-water swim in the pool by always sitting on the toes of the person in front of you, because if you do this all the time, you'll be drastically reducing your improvement potential by effectively under-training.
Understanding
Deeper insight into how to improve this aspect of your swimming
This is where you need to take a concerted look at yourself.
Are you swimming purely for enjoyment and being social with your mates? Do you find it fun sitting on the toes of someone in front of you, being sucked along? That's great if so. Keep doing it, but realise that over the long-term it will really stunt your improvement.
If you're here reading this, part of our 8-week Improvement Initiative, and you want to tick the boxes of the little habitual changes that you can make to turn these marginal gains into something much better for your swimming,
you need to flick a switch in your mind and know when it would serve you best to “take one for the team” and be a leader instead:
Reversible “Mood” Caps
We value both the benefits of leading AND your desire sometimes not to so much that we created a reversible swim cap that informs your lane buddies and your coach when you're in the mood for leading - get yours here.
Think of it like this: whether you swim in a busy squad, or just with a few mates, every time you're sat on their toes you're essentially under-training by being towed along. This is:
good for the ego as you will hit some pretty good paces
good for the mind to allow you to zone out a bit, but
bad for your continual improvement
For all the energy-saving benefits of drafting when you're racing, if you do this continually when you train, you'll make little to no progress at all, unless the person you are drafting is significantly faster than you and you're working super hard to stay there. The question is, are you really?
Take a look at these two screen grabs below from the Swim Smooth GURU from Perth Squad swimmer, Yolanda Carstens.
The first depicts her average heart rate*, pace per 100m, and her average stroke rate when she is leading the lane for a 500m swim
The second depicts her average heart rate*, pace per 100m, and her average stroke rate when she is following behind someone for a 400m swim
*Yolanda is in her 50s, but don't get too put out by her average heart rate (in both cases) which may well be a LOT higher than yours. Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) is such an individual thing, that whilst people say MHR = 220 minus your age, clearly that's not the case for Yolanda. There's nothing wrong with her, it's just that this rule fits ~30% of the population and is yet another reason why here at Swim Smooth we're all about you as an individual rather than trying to fit you in to some kind for generic ‘box’ because it's easier that way.
Yolanda when leading the pack
Yolanda when following the pack
Whilst her 400m swim is slightly slower than when she was leading, the point is simply that her heart rate was nearly 20bpm lower and her stroke rate was 10spm lower too.
You'll also note that Yolanda scored 100% for her pacing when she was leading versus 88% when she was following.
💥 Swim down a lane and lead VS up a lane and follow:
I cannot understate how much better it is for you to be leading a slightly slower lane in a squad (or leading your informal group) than simply drafting along in a lane that is a bit too quick.
The problem is, can your ego cope with that? Seriously.
If I had a dollar for every time someone said their ultimate goal was to be able to move up a lane in our Squad, I'd be a rich man 💰. But it's far better to be in a position to consistently lead your lane at your pace, than up a lane thinking that because the clock is telling you you're swimming faster, that this must be better for you. It's not.
A quick bit of history:
You've probably never thought too much about WHY we call our hardest endurance sessions “Red Mist”, but there's actually a very simple reason tied to all of the above.
Circa 2012, one of the best Age-Group female triathletes in our Squad qualified to race as a “PRO”. She was duly excited by this.
Knowing that the field size that she would race in would go from 500+ male and female athletes in a mass wave, to just 10-15 professional women, I knew from experience that this would require a significant change to her racing strategy. The ability to draft would be significantly reduced and as such we needed a training strategy to allow her to be able to still swim well even if she lost the toes of the women in front of her.
Consequently, I asked her during a harder endurance session - tailored to her distances - to move “down” a lane so as to lead. The goal was to improve both her ability to swim well without drafting AND improve her pacing so that she still exited the water as fresh as possible.
My critical error? Using the ‘D-word’, “down”.
The triathlete immediately assumed I was demoting her at a time when she should have been riding high on her new race license. Needless to say, in that moment she saw “red mist” as she threw her toys out of the pram and proceeded to leave the session. I was mortified.
Luckily, she returned the following day after I'd explained exactly why this was the strategy I was recommending. She came armed with a box of chocolates and a card to say sorry for the outburst. The card had a picture of the red “Angry Bird” on the front. We laughed at the incident, but in that moment a brand new session was created, one which has served hundreds of thousands of swimmers well worldwide since.
The Red Mist Endurance Session delivered by all of our Swim Smooth Coaches is a staple of our program these days and was all based off a very simple 10 x 400m set.
Routine
Actionable advice with a practical program that works
So, this week, your challenge is to undertake your own version of the Red Mist Endurance session BUT with a difference.
If you have a Garmin or Apple Watch, have a go doing one of the following variations of the Red Mist session and record your session. If you hop onto the Swim Smooth GURU you can gain a free 7-day trial to use the app to then analyse your session like we saw in Yolanda's case above.
If you haven't got one of these devices and just simply want to swim the set, that's cool, but take a real note of your paces that you swim and also how it feels with these variations.
Warm up:
~10 minutes of easy swimming to loosen off, including some drills and/or pull buoy and paddles if you feel like it.
Main set:
Do any one of the following:
10 x 50 + 15s rest (beginners)
10 x 100 + 20s rest
10 x 200 + 30s rest
10 x 300 + 30s rest
10 x 400 + 45s rest (advanced)
Ordinarily the classic Red Mist Endurance session involves you doing intervals 1-4 at CSS +6s/100, 5-7 at CSS +5s/100, 8+9 at CSS +4s/100 and 10 at CSS +3s/100. However, let's keep things much more simple today.
Aim to just hold the same pace for all 10 intervals at about CSS +5s/100. You can do this using a Finis Tempo Trainer PRO like I'm doing here set per 25 in Mode 1.
Get a friend of a similar pace to swim with you. You're going to lead 1+2, 5+6, 9+10 and they will lead 3+4 and 7+8 with you on their toes. Tell them that good pacing is essential and maybe let them use your Tempo Trainer to set the correct pace.
Make a note of how you feel when you're following and later, download your session into the GURU to analyse your heart rate and stroke rate response to the speed you swam at and whether you were leading or not. Notice something similar to Yolanda?
Ultimate
Nothing beats direct - and truly individualised - coaching from one of our Swim Smooth Coaches
Sw-improvers:
Nothing Beats a Real Coach!
The empathetic and expert coaching service being offered to the Sw-improvers is very much what you can expect when visiting any of our Swim Smooth Coaches - consider booking a session with one today by following this link.
This week I've been encouraging our Sw-improvers to get towards the front of the lane and to try the set above that I am recommending you try. Let's see what they made of it:
