Many triathletes use the winter, or ‘off season’ months, to lay the foundation for a new racing season. This period is also perfect to work on swimming technique. We asked the coaches of Personal Swimming what the importance of good swimming technique is and what could be improved in general. Personal Swimming has been training and coaching all kinds of swimmers for over 10 years; from novice triathletes to Kona participants and lane swimmers to young swimming talents. All from their passion and background as Olympic professional swimmers. Coach Bas is one of the founders of Personal Swimming and explains it to us. “In recent years we have seen more and more triathletes working on improving their swimming technique. “Finally!” we would sometimes like to say, because for a long time swimming was a bit of a side issue. While there is so much to gain with a good and efficient front crawl stroke. Not only in terms of saving time in the water, but especially in terms of energy conservation for the rest of the triathlon. We help the athletes who come to us mainly by gaining insight into their areas for improvement. By making a good video analysis of the swimming stroke, both above and below water, we clearly show where there is room for improvement in the technique. Since this summer, we also do a lot of 'Stroke efficiency measurements'. The measurement shows in clear graphs how efficiently you are swimming. With which stroke length and frequency are you swimming at different speeds. This provides even more insight into what you need to do during your swimming training. The main goal is to train smart, in order to actually become faster. These months are extremely suitable to work on this, precisely because you can make great progress in this now. During the racing season, or during the months when it is warmer or stays light longer, we see that fatigue or the training plan does not always allow for this. Although Bas counters: "There is always room for improvement. In the time that we made weeks of 35 hours of training, of which 20 hours were swimming. Technique training was always done at the end of the week or a heavy conditional set. Swimming qualitatively well under extreme fatigue is then the challenge. Actually no different from a triathlon, starting your race as well as possible from relaxation and efficiency brings the best end result. Want to get started with a private lesson yourself? With the following code PS10ACTIE you will receive €10 discount on a PT session with one of the coaches of Personal Swimming.

It is important to prepare yourself well for all aspects of a triathlon, including the transition moments. In collaboration with Training Tweaks, we organize transition clinics to help participants improve their transition technique. We interviewed Wouter Dijkshoorn, one of the trainers of Training Tweaks, about the focus and points of attention of the DTS Transition Clinics.