Smart Training Hacks For Triathletes

Brenton Ford here. In this video I’m going to share with you some smart training hacks for you to improve your triathlon swim training. You’ve seen the recent Triathlon World Championships held in New Zealand. One of our swimmers who uses the effortless swimming workouts, he won his age group in the 45 to 49 years age group for Olympic distance triathlon, making him the world champion in triathlon for Olympic distance for his age group. I interviewed Russell Smith in the latest episode of the Effortless Swimming Podcast, which is at swimmingpodcast.com. I asked him about how he’s been using the effortless swimming workouts as part of his training. The differences between some normal workouts that you might have done before and the effortless swimming workouts is there’s a few. The first one is if you’re doing a very short warm up and then going straight into main set, you usually missed out on being able to get the most out of your main set. Because if the body

is not warmed up, if the heart rate’s not up, then it can take a long time to get going in your main set and you missed out on the benefit of that. Whereas if you’re warming up for longer and you’re using some drills, you’re doing some kicks and skulls and changing your pace up in the warm up, then you’re ready to go for the main set and you can get the actual benefit out of the set for what the set is designed for. Because if you’re doing say 2100s where every fourth one is fast, it might take you 10 of those warm up if you’re not doing a proper warm up. One of the other things is if you’re doing all of your training just with pull buoy and paddles, then you’re going to build up a bit of strength, but you’re going to miss out on some of the fields with water. So if you’re doing everything with paddles and pull buoy, then it’s not the ideal way to improve your swimming. On the podcast, Russell shares how he uses the

workouts in his own training program. Where he gets emailed the workouts every month, he prints them off, takes them to the pool and goes to the workouts. There’s no need to take 15 to 20 minutes to think about what you’re going to do for the session and it makes it much harder to second guess yourself or take it the easy road and jump out early. If you’ve got the program in front of you, then it’s much easier to follow through, finish it off and work hard in the workout because it’s been set by someone else. Because if you set it yourself, I find the same thing that it’s much easier to jump out early and take the easy road. So the effort for swimming workouts are good if you’re trained by yourself or if you’re a coach or if you’re just looking to find a different kind of structure for your workouts if you’re not happy with what you’re currently doing. So check out that podcast with Russell Smith at SwimPodcast.com and he shares some good

insights into how he uses the workouts as part of his training program and how he set himself up really well on the swim in that world championship race that allowed him to go on to win that event. That’s it for news this week. I’ll see you next week.