5 things that get worse quickly when you stop swimming then try to train again

Courtesy of British Swammer Jon Beardsley

Let’s face it – everything goes down the chute when you stop swimming, but some things seem to crash out faster than others. Here are my top 5 things I noticed that died when I stopped training regularly…

ONE – Freestyle turns

I don’t know what it is about them over other turns, but almost immediately when I stopped training (not just swimming) regularly the ability to do a really fast and on-point freestyle turn just went. I used to be an OK 50m swimmer so I had pretty good underwater and particularly kickout, but after just a small while, the pop was gone: no coordination, poor body control, poor position on the wall, kick and exit timing was out…and that was going fairly slowly. They are the most complicated of the turns: all the others were fine!

Lesson: put effort into each freestyle turn! It doesn’t have to be race perfect, but it has to better than the last one.

TWO – Starts

The pool I train at during the day in the rainy UK is very “health and safety”. The only kit I can use is not much fun – pull buoy & kickboard. I haven’t regularly used a starting block for almost 18 months. When I go to meets with my swimmers, I have a lunchtime swim, during which I can use my kit (fins, paddles, snorkel) and the starting blocks. The other week I got down for what used to be my best aspect of my race – a forward track start, and I felt like I was about to fall over. I had a bad angle of entry, I couldn’t control my body position under the water, and I couldn’t carry the speed into my stroke, and I wasn’t used to swimming at that speed when I finally broke out. In honesty, as a sprinter, if I could only use one bit of kit during training, I’d make it a starting block.

Lesson: Treat each dive off the block like it’s a race. Don’t do the “hands on knees, can’t be bothered to get down fully” spring. Your start is very specific, so practice really does make perfect!

THREE – Butterfly technique

Well all know this one – get back in after summer break and 25 fly is a killer. Your knees are on the bottom, your stomach is on the bottom and you feel like you’re 8 again. This has happened to me several times over the last 18 months (and I used to be a good fly swimmer!) and my top tip is to swim 4-8 strokes, fast, with your head down checking:

• pressing your face towards the floor by sticking your neck out to get your hips up,
• check your feet are “busy” (either upkicking or downkicking),
• remembering to accelerate your hands and fast-kick your way out of the hole your chest makes.
• check the important physical bits too: chest and lat. length, neck & scapular mobility and ankle flexibility.

Lesson: get the basics of your fly technique right and you’ll go fast.

FOUR – Butterfly endurance

After you can do 25s again, a way to build your pure fly distance back up quickly is to mix fly with either back or free. On 4 sessions a week, over about 3 weeks I built up from 4×25 fly to a full 200. I’m sure a lot of you are thinking “…I do 10×200 fly” but remember I was swimming for about 4 hours a week and I was a sprinter, not a distance swimmer! Make sure you can do each bit with good fly rhythm – don’t switch to survival stroke. There’s a million ways to build fly capacity – this is just one. If you’re older, consider learning to single stroke breathe – I wouldn’t do it all the time unless you’re a natural at it but it’s a handy trump card to pull out in order to keep your rhythm when you’re getting fatigued in the last 15m or so.

Lesson: strive to keep your fly rhythm and you’ll keep your fly endurance up.

FIVE – Race pace coordination

Having never done much endurance work, I decided to try and push up my general capacity. After a week or so of endurance work, I tried to do some 25s/50s fast (something that was second nature before – not much happened. Couldn’t place the hands in, couldn’t kick fast, couldn’t coordinate arms and legs. Try and swim fast every day: but you already knew that – right?

Lesson: when your coach tells you to go fast – go fast and make it look like you want it to look!

If you used to be able to do them, all of these come back pretty quickly when you work at them. What else do you think goes downhill real fast?

Contributor Jon Beardsley lives in a mud hut in a rainy part of the UK. He used to swim on his University team but the training days are now sadly gone. He likes to still get in a swim regularly, but now mostly coaches instead. When he is looking for an excuse to not go and do some swim training he writes articles for SwimSwam or pretends he’s an Olympic weightlifter.