As the days are getting warmer and event day drawing closer, many of you will be thinking of heading to the open water for some training.
This can be a daunting process for lots of athletes, so we caught up with Andrew MacKay from Boost Coaching to share his insight into hitting the water!
Andrew’s thoughts below…
“In our preparation for the summer season a number of you will start diving or dipping your toes into the open water for your training, I want to highlight a couple of key things you must continue to do in all your training environments.
- Do you train multiple paces and varying the time at which you execute those paces within swim sets?
- Do you have structured workouts that have specific targets to develop varying training intensities?
Training intensities and session durations can help you perform better in races by helping you to adapt to the change of paces, intensities and the distance you have to swim on race day. Most good swim squads will have a range of sessions that focus on various training intensities over varying distances and this is exactly the same thing that needs to happen in the open water too.
I see a number of people who swim on their own or with their small social groups that continue to train year in year out doing the same thing and getting the same result. This lack of training stimulation tends to result in the same or close to the same performances, I would simply put this down to the fact that your body knows the workouts you do each week and therefore has comfortably adapted to doing these workouts.
What are your strengths and weaknesses when you reflect on the events you have completed through the season? Was it your starts – could you start fast enough to get with better swimmers, were you able to hold pace through the middle of the swim and build to the end so you finished strong, was it your open water skills etc.”
