Speed Skills
21 February 2020
14:37
Improve your movement efficiency in each of the three sports by improving our speed skills (or technique). Swim is the sport in which movement skill is most critical.
The first step in learning a new skill is watching other athletes who have already mastered it. Pay special attention to their movement during the particular skill you're trying to develop. A great time to do this is immediately before you work on that skill.
The second step is to make the movement slowly while watching yourself move. Isolate the movement and do it outside the context of the entire body's movement. You're moving only one body prt while the rest of your body remains stationary. If you're working on a swimming skill, do this on the deck, not in the water.
Once you0ve honed the skill by isolating and slowly doing it over and over while watching, it's time to do it in the context off the sport. Now you swim, bike or run while staying focused only on making the critical movement of the single body part. Once you have mastered it, you will still do this slow-motion movement with a single arm or leg focus during warm-ups.
Step 4: Speed up
After you've mastered the movement in slow motion, which may take a few session, you can slowly add speed. Now you need to divide the workout into short segments lasting only a few seconds at first, building eventually to a few minutes. After each of these brief repetitions, you must rest in order to prevent fatigue from setting in. Fatigue is the enemy of skill development.
At this stage, you must stay focused on proper movement when you become tired. At the first sign of the new movement pattern breaking down, take a recovery break to shed some fatigue.
Can you make the desired movement patterns in a race ? To test yourself, do a C-priority race with the goal of maintaining your newly developed skill during a high-effort performance.
You must master them in the order. E.g. before developing direction, you must master posture
IF you keep your head up looking at the wall, then your hips are lowered in the water and drag increases. To improve your posture, point your nose toward the bottom of the pool (p197, fig 12.1).
Direction has to do with the angle at which your hands and arms enter the water relative to the intended swim direction. On entry, they should be aimed in the direction you are swimming. Many triathletes cross over.
The on-deck drill for learning the direction skill is simple. Stand bent over at the waist with a proper head posture and slowly reach out with one arm in front of your shoulder as if taking a stroke. Peek up to see where your hand is. It should be in front of your shoulder and not crossing over.
A simple in-water exercise for learning good direction is the "penguin" drill. Swim one length of the pool while trying to put your hands and arms into the water much more widely apart than your shoulders. Most athletes with poor direction skill will find that their hands are now exactly where they are supposed to be on entry.
As the name implies, this skill has to do with how long your body is in the water from fingertips to toes. Fast swimmers are very long and narrow on each stroke.
Stand on the deck facing a wall that is just a few inches away from you. With one arm at your side, reach up over your head with the other arm as if taking a stroke and place your hand on the wall.
Now take this skill to the water by doing two length-focused drills while swimming:
When you are swimming, a catch occurs when the palm of your hand is pointing at the wall you're swimming away from.
Avoid the "death move" by keeping your elbow above your wrist when your arm is above the water. When you combine that with a long reach over the water and the fingertips enter first, you immediately get a catch.
On the deck, stand bent over at the waist with both arms at your sides. Take a stroke with one arm while keeping the elbow straight. Reach. The shoulders should tilt during the stroke to maximize length. As the arm is reaching its full extension, point the fingers down at the deck, you now have a catch.
Here's a quick position reinforcement you can do as soon as you are back in the pool. If your pool has starting platforms for racing, reach up with both hands and place your palms on the platform. That's the catch position, and you can use it to lift your body up a bit out of the water as though you were going to get out of the pool.
In the pool, the "windmill" drill. Your goal is to swim like a windmill. In other words, you arms will be straight with the elbows never bending, whether above the water or in it. As your hand and arm are swinging high over the water, reach out and point your fingers down in order to create a catch.
If I were your coach, I'd have you devote 4 weeks or about 12 to 16 swim session, just to mastering PDLC by doing the drills described above.
You want to do each of these sessions in the same way:
On the bike there are 4 primary skills to master:
The good news is that this is going to be easy. There are two things you can do that will help with all four skills.
The bike fit is so important that you should get one every year even if you are riding the same bike from last year. The time to do this is early in the season; the base 1 period is the perfect time.
When it comes to pedalling and the bike-handling skills of cornering, climbing, and descending, one of the best ways to refine those skills is by riding off road on a mountain bike or cyclocross bike. The best times to do this are in the prep and base 1 periods at the very start of your training year.
Only one skill when mastered can produce a significant improvement in performance. That skill is how you place your foot on the ground. To find out about your foot placement, have someone shoot a video of you both running toward the camera and in side view.
The first drill is simple. Stand facing a wall and about 50cm away from it. Put your hands on the wall so that you are slightly leaning onto it. Now lift your right foot off the floor as if taking a running stride and let it drop back to the floor. The right foot should drop straight down and land in front of the left foot, not beside it. Repeat this several times with both feet.
Once you've mastered the foot-drop drill, you should progress to a strides drill. This drill is best done on a soft surface, such as grass. A park where you can run in a straight line for about 100m is perfect.
Start the drill by running the length of the field at a comfortable, warm-up speed. Pay close attention to your lead foot and knee. The foot should be rising and falling below the lifted knee just s wit the foot-drop drill. Concentrate on nothing else but this. Turn around and walk back to the starting point. Do four to eight such strides in a session. Each should be slightly faster than the previous, so start slowly.
In an advanced version of strides, you run as described above, only now you count your steps for one left only. Run for 20 seconds on the same grassy surface while counting. The goal is to count 30 steps in 20 seconds, that's a cadence of 90 RPM. Continue to focus on a flat foot landing when doing this timed drill.
Let's add another drill to be combined with the strides drill. Do about 20 seconds of skipping after each stride before you begin to walk back to the strides starting point. Alternate legs so that you do a single hop on one left and then a hop on the other.
After a few timed strides plus skipping sessions, you will be ready for an advanced running drill to build power. There are two advanced variations to this drill.
The final stage of the skipping drill progression is to do the workout barefoot. This will strengthen your feet and lower legs to help you run faster, and it will also reduce the likelihood of a running-related injury. Be aware however that this highly advanced running drill can also cause injury.
Approach barefoot running with caution, inspect the strides run closely to make certain there is nothing that can injure your feet or dog droppings while you are running barefoot. Don't rung barefoot if you have a cut on your foot, no matter how small.
When starting to run barefoot sessions, start with a low number of sets. If you've been doing eight of them with your regular running shoes, do only four the first time you do them with lightweight shoes/barefoot.
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