Week 4 of 8: Don't Let Your Pull Buoy Addiction Curtail Your Swimming Improvement
In Summary (TL;DR)
This is Week 4: only use your pool toys when there's a purpose behind doing so (I'm looking at you Mr or Mrs Pull Buoy Addict!)
How to test your pull buoy dependancy
Ditch the pull buoy and - if you must - consider buoyancy shorts instead
How did you get on with last week's Red Mist Endurance challenge? Did you see the differential in your heart rate and stroke rate that Yolanda saw between leading her lane and not? Has it prompted the start of an habitual change to leading the herd instead as/when you can?
Unfortunately, there's not always the opportunity to everyone to lead a busy Squad, but equally, even armed with all of last week's insight, some still won't want to lead. So, take the bull by the horns and get to the front of your lane and worry less about which lane that actually is!
This week we're going to look at one of the biggest habits likely affecting your improvement: over-reliance on swimming toys, pull buoys especially.
So here goes for Week 4: ditching the pull buoy
Guidance
Simple pointers for all swimmers, triathletes and their coaches
There's three reasons I get told people are using their pull buoy in a Squad session when they elect to pick it up on a non-prescribed set (naughty, naughty!):
I'm building my strength
I'm resting my legs from the massive volume of cycling and running I'm doing
I'm simulating my wetsuit
Now, aside from genuine medical reasons, the real reason you're picking up your pull buoy is because:
It's much easier to swim with it (for most people)
You can stay with faster swimmers (for most people)
You've done it for so long now that you've formed a very hard-to-break habit
Understanding
Deeper insight into how to improve this aspect of your swimming
We must also remember that swimming is not limited by strength, it's limited by your technique and your aerobic conditioning first and foremost.
Equally, whilst a pull buoy might have similar buoyancy properties to a wetsuit, there are two problems with this ‘theory’ of simulation:
with a pull buoy you don't need to kick, whereas with a wetsuit (even if you think you don't kick much at all) you are still moving your legs, and that requires effort
because you have to squeeze your legs together to hold the pull buoy there, any crossing-over of your arms as you enter with the wetsuit will still cause a scissoring of the legs and drag to be created with the wetsuit, but this will be nullified with the pull buoy.
Circa 1995 I had just started to train for triathlons and was intrigued by this new sport. I'd been conditioned to believe that I needed to “save my legs for the bike” and that I should “not worry about kicking at all” anymore. As such, I decided to do the majority of my swim training with a pull buoy and/or pull buoy and paddles.
This felt good. They played to my strengths and I was swimming some great times in training. I readied myself for a 1,500m pool swim in France 🇫🇷 which of course I could use neither of these toys for. I wasn't concerned, “my new strength will get me through” I naively thought.
Long story short: the gun went off, I went out like scorched cat 🙀, blew up terribly, and felt like my heart was going to explode. Oh, and was lapped a bunch of times too! A disaster.
How could this be?
Two things:
My pacing was terrible
I had lost physical condition by using the pull buoy so much that when I came to use my legs, my heart rate was sky-high
Over two decades later I tried my first SwimRun event where both pull buoy and paddles are not only legal, but encouraged and part of the culture:
The idea of using the pull buoy is to provide respite from the drag created by swimming with your running shoes on which amounts to about a 8-20s/100 disadvantage I've found. The paddles are there to give you a little bit of extra ‘grip’ to hold the water and save your legs further for the next run.
When I did the ÖtillÖ World SwimRun Championships in 2018 with my race partner, Andy Blow, this involved a massive 10km of open-water swimming and 65km of hard trail running in the Swedish Archipelago, so efficiency was everything. I wanted to ensure that I could get my heart rate down as low as possible on the swim legs to recover for the next run.
Being the swim nerd that I am, I decided to experiment with the equipment I was using against the speed I was swimming and at what average heart rate.
My studies showed that my heart rate was typically 25-30bpm lower when using a pull buoy than when swimming without it at the same speed.
Squad swimmer Manue Hooper-Bue’s heart rate profile in a set of 3 x (200 freestyle + 300 pull and paddles) where the pull buoy and paddles speed was 8-10s/100m faster, but heart rate was still lower
No wonder I had that disastrous experience 20 years earlier in France - I had essentially de-trained myself so much with the pull buoy that I had no pure swimming fitness left at all.
Again, both medical conditions and enjoyment factors aside, overly utilising your pull buoy in the misbelief that you are helping your swimming, will do nothing for your improvement.
There is a time and a place for pull buoy use, but not all the time.
🔎 How are buoyancy shorts different?
Buoyancy shorts are a much better option for anyone who's in love with the buoyancy benefits of their pull buoy, simply because they give you the same level of buoyancy, but still require you to kick. In that regard, they're a much better simulation of swimming with a wetsuit. As Squad swimmer Stu said to me last week about his newly gifted shorts:
“I feel like these will extend my swimming life by another 20 years!”
Routine
Actionable advice with a practical program that works
This week, I want you to just repeat your version of the Red Mist Endurance session from last week, but your experiment now becomes less about the effects of drafting and more about the effects of the pull buoy.
Repeat the 10 x 50, 100, 200, 300 or 400 intervals but do numbers 1+2, 5+6, 9+10 without a pull buoy and numbers 3+4 and 7+8 with a pull buoy. Whether you use paddles as well is entirely up to you. Record your times and your heart rate with either a Garmin or Apple Watch and upload into the Swim Smooth GURU for analysis.
What do your results show? Let's see how our eager beavers got on:
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.
Let's see which one of our Sw-improvers struggled the most with ditching their pull buoy?
