Lost Without Lane Lines? The Open Water Skills Every Triathlete Needs
Are you lost without lane lines?
Do you struggle with sighting?
Wonder why your pool speed doesn’t translate to open water?
You’re in the right place.
With some help from the open water swim OG, Coach Leo Briceno, we’ll not only discuss you the skills you should be working to improve your open water swim, we’ll explain how to do them.
A few weeks ago, we had the pleasure of hosting an Open Water Swim webinar for paid subscribers with Coach Leo Briceno. For those of you who don’t know Coach Leo, he’s an open water swim expert based in South Florida with 30+ years of experience with coaching. You can find him on Clearwater Beach leading the largest open water swim training group in the region, coaching the St. Pete Beach Masters swim group, or taking swimmers on trips down Rainbow River.
In the following Q&A, we talk about:
Why triathletes struggle in open water
Common mistakes new swimmers make
The importance of streamline
How to sight, breathe, and kick
Best drills for improving your open water swim
Why you swim slower in open water than the pool
and much more!
Q&A with Coach Leo
Brittany- Tell us a bit about your background in swimming. I know you grew up in Venezuela and was a competitive swimmer.
Coach Leo- “Everything started when I was seven. In my family, there was no swimming background. My mom didn't think it was important, because she didn't know how to swim. That was the culture, you know. It’s something we share with many households here in the U.S.
I wanted to try swimming, so I went to the YMCA, but the people in charge of lessons weren’t very good instructors. They just threw me in the deep end, and I was drowning. I remember smelling the chlorine and swallowing water, so I didn't touch the water again until I was 13. By the time I was 15, I was swimming in Nationals and did my first Olympic distance triathlon. It was a lot of fun, and I got hooked.”
My first job was in a preschool. They had a pool there, so I started giving lessons to the kids. I've been teaching since I was 15. Now I'm 55, so it's been a long time!”
Why open water is different than the pool
Brittany- A lot of triathletes seem to struggle in open water. I think part of it has to do with being adult-onset swimmers. We don’t learn to swim until our 20s or 30s, when we’re training for a triathlon. Why do you think triathletes have so much trouble going from the pool to open water?
Leo- “Not everywhere is Clearwater, you know? St. Anthony’s Triathlon is still big at around 3,500 entries, but it used to be the largest triathlon in the US at around 5,000. People would come from up north, and they only had lakes, or it was too cold. So, they didn’t have the opportunity to swim in open water.
They’d go to the pool and think they could do the same in open water, no problem. When in reality, that's not the case. The other side of it is people taking it for granted. They say, ‘Oh, I swim in the pool. It’s just water. It will be the same.’ But it’s not.”
Brittany- Swimming in open water is completely different! You don’t have lane lines or a black line to follow on the bottom of the pool. You're not pushing off the wall every length. You have to sight. There can be waves, chop, low visibility, and the sun. Then, in a triathlon, you've got people swimming around you, so there's many different factors. I think that’s why open water swim practice is so important.
Leo- “You're completely right and, like you said, every body of water is different. The ocean isn’t the same as the lake. The lake isn’t the same as the river. And neither of those are the same as the pool. The ocean is the one with more unfavorables, like high tide, reef currents, wind, and saltiness.”
Skills for new swimmers
Brittany- When you’re teaching a new swimmer to go in open water for the first time, what things do you work on?
Leo- “I just taught a lesson on Friday, and the guy asked me what I wanted him to do. I told him to do whatever he knew how to do- it could be freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke. How do you stay afloat? How do you move from point A to point B? Because if I told him to start out doing freestyle, he probably doesn’t know the mechanics yet. So he did a couple of things, and then we sat down to talk about it.
In his case, the first thing he was doing was holding his breath. I always ask triathletes: Do you hold your breath when you run? Do you hold your breath when you ride a bike? The answer is of course not. So why are you holding your breath in the swim, when you need it most?”
Brittany- I find that my breathing pattern changes depending on my level of exertion. If I'm swimming easy or steady, I'll breathe every three strokes on both sides. Then, once I get up to Olympic or above sprint, I'm breathing every stroke. But I always try to breathe to the right on the way down and to the left on the way back, because I find that if you only ever breathe to one side, it changes your stroke.
Leo- “Yes, and if you’re swimming on a shoreline and the waves are hitting you on one side, then you can breathe to the other. Then, when you turn around, you can switch. It’s good to know how to breathe to both sides. Then, when it comes to a race, you come up with your own plan.”
Sighting technique
Brittany- Another important skill to learn is sighting. You obviously don’t have to do it in a pool, but then you get in open water and you have to follow the buoys. Not only that, but you have to navigate around hundreds of other people. Some people think, “I’ll just follow the feet in front of me.” But they might not know where they’re going either. How do you teach people to sight?
Leo- “The first thing to know is when you sight, you don't have to breathe. You're just moving your head forward to sight to see what you're doing. Also, you don’t have to measure the dimensions of the buys or anything, just look for the color. If it’s a little choppy, you might have to sight more often.
Then, you have to think about how many strokes can you swim before you start to drift to the left or the right. You start sighting before that number, so you can try to go straight.
One of the things I teach people is you can divide the body into four quadrants. You’ll see that when people breathe, or are about to breathe, the arm in the front goes down. So both arms are down in the third and the fourth quadrant. Then what happens? You lose balance. So, you want always one arm in front of you to breathe and leave it there. The other arm being in the back is ideal. We call this shooting the arrow. It provides more stability and the horizontal position that we want.
When you’re about to sight, the hand in front is going to provide a little support. So, look where you’re going and then turn your head to the side and breathe.”
OWS drills for the pool
Brittany- What are some of your favorite drills to work on open water skills in the pool?
Leo- “I actually did this with my swimmers last Monday. I told them we were going to swim without touching the wall or the bottom of the pool. You lose momentum because you just turn around and have to kick to get going again. Sometimes, we will take the lane lines out of the pool and put buoys in to practice sighting. We do games to make it fun.
I’m old school, so sometimes I have water polo balls that I’ll throw in front of them to encourage them to sight. If you don’t see the ball and bump into it, you have to do 20 push-ups. It just helps with muscle memory to sight more often.
One thing we do is sight every two strokes, then every four, and every 6. Then, you go back down again. You could also sight just once for 25y or right after you push off the wall, because you have propulsion helping you. You could also do the Tarzan drill, where you keep your head above water for the entire length of swimming.”
Brittany- The Tarzan drill is hard! Sometimes, I do it with a pool buoy, which helps give your hips a little lift. Another challenging one is underwater freestyle.
Speaking of swimming in the pool, versus open water, why is it that often our pool speed doesn’t translate to open water?
Leo- “To start with, in the pool, you have the walls. If you’re swimming in a 25y pool, you’re pushing off three times per 100 yards. Then, if you’re swimming in a lane by yourself, the water is still. In open water, the water is moving all over the place. Also, the tide might be against you, or on the side. Then, you also have to sight to see where you’re going.
A good experiment would be to do a 200 in open water from buoy to buoy. Then, go back to the pool and do a 200 without touching the wall, and see how the times compare. One of my swimmers is actually faster in open water. It’s because his stroke changes slightly, and he gets in the zone. Swimmers, cyclists, and runners all love momentum. Cycling is the easiest to gain momentum with again, once you stop or turn. But with swimming, you’re starting completely at zero with no momentum, so it takes time to get back up to speed.”
“Swimming the distance”
Brittany- I think there's a misconception, when people get to the longer distances, like the 1.2-mile swim in a 70.3 or the 2.4-mile swim in an Ironman. The thought process is, “I just want to cover the distance.” So they get in and swim for 45 minutes straight.
Now, swimming long distances can be good sometimes. But if every time you get in the pool, you’re swimming without stopping, you’re not working on good form or doing any variations in speed. So, you’re not setting yourself up well to swim a long distance. What’s your opinion?
Leo- “I completely agree. You can't just swim for distance. There’s one thing we do in training where you can swim non-stop and see how you feel. Then, we take the average per hundred. We sit down and look at every interval and discuss, like this is how you started fast and then you go down and don’t go back up again.
Let’s say that distance was 700. That could be our warm-up. From then on, we do sets, like 500, 200 and 100. Then, we work on builds, because in a race you might need to accelerate to pass someone and then go back to your pace.”
Brittany- I did that this morning! We had build sets of 75s. Sometimes, we build in effort, by 25, within each 75. Then, sometimes we build through the entire set of 75s, so the last one is strong. By doing things like this, I’ve developed the ability to have different paces. So, I’ve got my easy pace, steady/70.3 pace, Olympic/tempo, sprint/strong, and fast.
Each one has a slightly different breathing pattern, and my stroke rate changes a bit. I think being able to have those speed shifts are important, because most triathlon swimmers have two speeds- easy and hard. And easy doesn’t even feel easy.
Breath timing
Brittany- Can you explain how to time your breath in the freestyle stroke?
Leo- “Remember that your head is a shield. It’s like when you’re in the shower and you can still breathe because there’s a pocket of air. It’s the same thing with swimming.
Remember that we glide with our lats, not our hand, so there’s a reach. When you have one arm in front of you, it offers support. At that point, when the hand in the back is touching your leg, and you turn to breathe, the arm in the front is offering that support. Then, at the same time, between the back arm coming around, the front arm starts pulling. So it creates this space that allows you to breathe and keep moving forward.
There are drills, like single arm, with a kickboard, or with both arms down just working on the rotation. I tell people to imagine kayaking. When you go kayaking, you don't kayak flat. You move your shoulders and rotate. When swimming freestyle, the first thing that comes out of the water is your shoulder. Then, when your shoulder is out of the water, your arm is free to move. But if you're very straight across your chest, it's difficult.”
Brittany- Honestly, I could just do drills and be happy! And we do a lot. Sometimes, I look and I’ve done 1,500y of drills before I even get to the main set. I love using a kick board for single-arm freestyle, and we do a really cool one called butter-free. With fins on, you do a single dolphin kick with every freestyle stroke. It helps me connect my hips to my stroke, because I have a tendency to rotate from side to side. I’ll do this drill for 50y and then swim normal, and I can really feel the snap from the hips that helps propel me forward.
Leo- “Drills, drills, drills. I always tell people, even the Olympians do drills. There are some triathletes who don’t have a coach, and they listen to 400 different people’s advice in videos. Oh, you should do this, and you should do that. Then, they jump in the water and freeze because they’re so confused. It’s good to watch videos, but you aren’t going to get better at open water swimming by listening. You have to do it.”
Kicking and body position
Brittany- One thing I see with new swimmers is kicking like a motorboat, because they think that’s how they’re going to get to the other side of the pool. Then, you see other people not kicking at all, because they’re trying to save their legs for the bike and run. I was taught that the kick isn’t necessarily for propulsion, but more for balance.
Leo- “So a 50-meter swimmer is going to say their kick is just for propulsion, because they’re just swimming 50 meters and that's it. Also, the stroke is completely different. Then, with distance, think about when Katie Ledecky broke the world record for the first time. I was watching it thinking, is she even kicking at all? Now, you also have to think, they swim 16,000 yards a day, so they practice body position a lot.
In talking about the kick, a lot of people make the mistake of having their toes pointed down toward the bottom of the pool. People say you need a small ballerina kick, but often that can cause the feet to get too rigid. You also have to relax. Think about when you ride a bike. You don’t just push down on the pedal; you also pull up. It’s the same thing with kicking. So, it’s up-down-up-down. That’s what we call a flutterkick.
One of my swimmers doesn't like kicking. So, one day, it was his birthday, and we did 10 x 200 kicking. He was about to cry.”
Brittany- Another common problem is scissor kicking, when the legs splay out to the sides when you turn to breathe. I think this can be caused from over-rotation, but might it also be caused from the breath timing being off?
Leo- “First, you’re going to need to practice kicking a little bit more and learn how to keep your body in a horizontal position. Being horizontal is so important. I teach people how to streamline before the stroke to make them appreciate what a good streamline does for you. So, in a streamline, you’re putting the chin toward your chest and relaxing one hand on top of the other directly in front of you. Every time you push off the wall, go into your streamline. Almost all pools have backstroke flags, so that’s your signal. Don’t move your arms to start your stroke until you cross that line.”
Brittany- How does learning streamline help us stay in the right body position when we’re swimming?
Leo- “You're gaining momentum as soon as you push off the wall. When you push off the wall, that's the strongest you'll ever be. If you mimic the streamline position a little bit each length throughout the swim, you start learning how to keep your body in a horizontal position.”
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