Stop Fighting the Water: How to Master the Long-Distance Triathlon Swim without Just Adding More meters

Written By Kevin Watson

You can’t out-fitness bad technique in the pool. Here is why your swim split has plateaued and the blueprint to fix it before your next Ironman or 70.3.

Swimming is frustrating

It’s 6:30 AM. You’re staring at the black line at the bottom of the pool. Again.

You are putting in the hours. Your bike power is up. Your run splits are getting faster. Your aerobic engine is massive. Yet, every time you look at the pace clock at the end of a 100m interval, the number is frustratingly the same as it was six months ago.

If you are training for a long-distance triathlon, this scenario is painfully painfully common. Many triathletes are "adult-onset swimmers" coming from running or cycling backgrounds. You bring massive lungs and a strong work ethic to the pool, but find that effort doesn’t equal speed water the same way it does on land.

The hard truth is this: Swimming is not a fitness problem. It is a physics problem.

If you want to improve your Ironman or 70.3 swim split and more importantly, arrive at T1 fresh rather than exhausted you have to stop fighting the water and start working with it.

Swimming countless lengths could be harming you

When a triathlete wants to improve their bike split, the answer is usually straightforward: increase volume or increase intensity. The engine gets bigger, the bike goes faster.

When they apply that same logic to the pool, disaster strikes.

If your technique is flawed, adding more volume just ingrains bad habits. You become incredibly fit at swimming inefficiently. You might shave a minute off your Ironman swim time, but the metabolic cost of that minute is so high that it ruins the first hour of your bike leg.

The goal of the long-distance swim is not just speed; it’s economy. You need to cover 3.8km (or 1.9km) using the absolute minimum amount of energy necessary.

Focus on making adjustment while you swim

At Total Endurance, we always tell swimmers to initially focus on short intervals and use each 25/50m length to think about a key aspect of their stroke. The short reps allow you to keep focused on what you’re doing and use short recoveries to ‘reset’ and start the next length with purpose and not just zoning out and doing a 2/3km set where you spent the whole swim counting down to the end of the session.

During these short intervals, we can learn to take more good strokes and slowly make improvements to our stroke through purposeful and deliberate practice.

Swimming Hierarchy

Here are the three areas you must address to transform your swim:

1. Body Position:

Before we talk about moving forward, we need to reduce the things that are slowing you down. Water is 800 times denser than air; drag is your worst enemy.

Many triathletes swim with low hips and sinking legs (often due to tight hip flexors from cycling). This means you are effectively towing a parachute behind you. No amount of arm strength can overcome that drag efficiently.

  • The Fix: We focus on posture, head position, and core engagement to get you swimming "downhill," with hips high on the surface. If we reduce drag by 20%, you get 20% faster for free.

  • Use the pull buoy! Yes, you read that correctly we’re advising you to use the pull buoy. Many coaches tell you to stop using the pully buoy as it’s “cheating”. While we want to get you to a point you can swim without needing additional buoyancy aids but until then, using a pull buoy and/or buoyancy shorts to help keep the legs a bit higher in the water which can massively help you with your breathing and instantly allow you to swim further with less effort and allowing you to take more good strokes which help compound into better swimming.

2. Propulsion:

If you watch a good swimmer, they seem to ‘glide’ through the water and everything looks so smooth and effortless, a mistake triathletes (and some coaches) fall into the trap of trying to emulate the ‘effortless’ look. The problem with this is, these fish like people has likely spent years doing 5+ swims per week refining their technique to be incredibly efficient and let’s be honest, we’re never going to accumulate the meters to become this efficient.

In triathlon, the goal is to try get out the swim as fast as possible having saved the most amount of energy possible and while we want to become more efficient over time, its usually better to be slightly scrappy in the water with a slightly higher turnover than traditional club swimmers would do.

The main difference is "the catch." Great swimmers anchor their hand and forearm in the water and pull their body past that anchor point. Struggling swimmers slip their hands through the water, churning it up without gaining traction.

  • The Fix: Learning to ‘feel’ the resistance of the water and press ourselves forward against this force.

  • Use paddles: Using paddles in your sets can instantly improve your ability to generate propulsion and help build swim specific strength faster.

3. Open Water Specificity:

You are training for an open-water mass start event, and why as we eluded to above; a perfect pool stroke can fall apart when you add chop, dark water, wetsuit buoyancy, and 200 other people trying to swim over top of you. If you are anxious in open water, your breathing spikes and your technique vanishes.

  • The Fix: We bridge the gap between the pool and the open water. We practice sighting drills that don’t ruin your body position, drafting techniques to save 20% energy, and pacing strategies designed for the long haul. Learning to breathe to both sides can be advantageous. Note - this doesn’t mean you have to breathe every 3 strokes, if you normally breathe every 2, keeping breathing every 2 but just to the other side.

Why you can’t youtube Your Way to a Better Swim

If you could fix your swim by watching YouTube videos, you would have done it by now.

The reason self-coaching fails in swimming is a lack of proprioception—the awareness of where your body is in space.

What you feel like you are doing in the water is rarely what you are actually doing. You might feel like your arm is straight out in front of you, but video reveals it is crossing over your centerline and causing your hips to snake.

You cannot fix errors you cannot see.

Stop Guessing. Start Improving.

If you are committing months of your life to training for a long-distance triathlon, don't leave the first discipline to chance. Stop wasting energy in the pool and start building a stroke that will set up your best race day.

At Total Endurance, we specialise in helping triathletes swim faster with 121 coaching, video analysis and providing technical analysis and structured coaching.

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Kevin Watson
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