10 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Swimming

In this video, I'm going to share with you 10 things that I wish someone had told me when I first started swimming. Or if you've been swimming for a while, these tips will also help you get to the next stage with your swimming goals. Because let's be honest, most beginners train too hard, focus on the wrong things, and waste a lot of time that stops them from getting to under two minutes per hundred, and they end up wasting a lot of effort. And sometimes it leads to shoulder injuries and other things when they focus on the wrong things. But these 10 lessons will give you clarity on the gear, technique, training mindset, and what actually leads to progress. These are the things that make the biggest difference for me and the swimmers that I coach. And when you apply them, you'll feel more confident, you'll swim smoother and faster with less effort, and swimming might just become one of the best parts of your life. Let's dive in. Not all swim gear is worth it. Here's what actually helps. There's a lot of stuff that you are told to get when you start swimming. But in reality, you could get away with just having a pair of swimwear and goggles. That is really all that you need to get started. But there are some things that can help you progress faster. The things that I recommend my swimmers get, number one, is a good pair of fins. A pair of fins that are comfortable, flexible, and give you a good amount of propulsion without changing your stroke. Something like the DMC fins are very, very good for the majority of swimmers out there. There are other brands that have stiff and rigid fins that actually can make your swimming worse, so it's best to avoid those. When it comes to snorkels, most snorkels are all pretty much the same. As long as you find a comfortable front snorkel, then that can be a good tool for the majority of swimmers out there. It helps take away the need to turn your head to breathe, and that can be a good thing when looking to develop your catch and your pull and your kick and rotation. So that's also another piece of equipment that I'd recommend. Another thing, if you are doing triathlons or open water swimming, you may want to build your strength using a pull buoy and paddles. So getting a pair of those can be worthwhile for some types of swimmers, but in reality, some swimwear, some goggles will take you a long way in your journey. Technique overwhelm is a real thing, and if you've watched any of our videos or you've scrolled on Instagram or on YouTube, you've probably been inundated with technique advice. But the thing with too much advice is, if there's too much there, you're probably not going to do any of it. If you look at learn to swim lessons for children, quite often they'll start with breathing and bubbles, and then they progress from there. As an adult, there's a good chance you should probably follow the same sort of progression. Now, you might be able to go through some of those aspects of the stroke a little bit quicker than young kids might be able to. However, we still need to learn good foundations and fundamentals. Don't try and work on your catch if you're still struggling to swim more than 50 meters. You probably need to go back to the basics of breathing, blowing bubbles, floaty, getting your body horizontal in the water. Some of these fundamentals are where we need to start. Sometimes our ego and our pride gets in the way. I don't need to do that. I'm an adult. Kids can do it, but I don't need to. But quite often the stuff that we're teaching adults in our clinics, it stems from a lot of learn to swim stuff and getting those basics right. So if you can get your ego out of the way and be willing to go through something that might seem really basic, there's a good chance that long term, two, three years down the track, you're going to progress a lot quicker and a lot more sustainably where you can reach higher levels in your swimming if you get good at those fundamentals. I trained too hard and got slower. When I look back at my swimming career as a teenager, one thing that I realized is that I went too hard too often in the easy stuff. So I was in that gray zone where my slow stuff was too fast. My fast stuff was too slow. So I was in that training gray zone where I wasn't really training in the right zones. Now, as a result of that, I feel like I probably didn't progress as far as I could have if I had been willing to do my aerobic sets at an aerobic heart rate and my faster stuff actually to have the speed and have that recovery in there where I could hit faster speeds and higher levels there. So one of the mistakes a lot of people make is they don't look at those different zones. They train in that middle section. And I think the reason I did that was because I thought the harder I train, the harder I work, the more I'll progress. Which is true to a certain extent. However, sometimes if we get stuck in that zone, then we're not hitting the right heart rates and other things. So I feel like that probably stunted my progress a bit as a teenager. Now, for you as an adult, maybe you're doing everything at one speed and you're not changing the pace that you're doing. Or perhaps you're stuck in that gray zone as well. So it's good to make sure that we follow a good training plan, follow something with some structure, and we're committing to it and sticking to it. Something like our ES squad workouts that we've got in our membership. They break it down into different speeds, what efforts, what speeds you should be going to. So you actually see real progression and you don't get stuck at that one zone. Open water swimming isn't just a pool without walls. In open water, there are so many variable conditions that it can really feel like a different sport in a way. And so if you're coming from swimming in the pool with a background in it and you're very comfortable in the pool, you might have a bit of a shock when it comes to open water swimming, where you feel like everything you've learnt in the pool doesn't apply in the open water. Now, it does, except that it just takes a bit of getting used to the variable conditions, where the water isn't flat, it's not smooth, and you're probably having to almost go against some of those things you learnt in the pool in terms of your breathing. You might need to turn a little bit higher. You might need to begin your catch a little bit sooner. Your stroke rate might need to come up. There's certain things that you do need to change in the open water compared to in the pool, but it is something that you can get good at, even if you come from that pool background. It just takes time and it takes practice and there's not really any shortcuts to it apart from putting in the work. If you can get really good at siding, at maybe coming over the water a little bit higher, a little bit quicker over the top, and knowing how much you need to increase your stroke rate in the open water, and being willing to be imperfect and a little bit choppy with it, then you can become very good at open water. But it does sometimes feel like it's a different sport when you first come to it, though it does take time to get used to. Stop training like a runner. You're a swimmer now. When people run, they often go for long runs and it's just all at the same pace and there's no breaks in between. And for running, that can be a really good way to approach it a lot of the time. But in swimming, if you look at any of the best swimmers in the world, they are all breaking their sessions into sets, warm-up, cool-down, main set, pre-set, and more importantly, they're breaking it down into intervals of 100s and 200s and 50s with rest in between. And the thing about doing that is it feels like it's actually not going to help you because you're taking rest in between. But even 5 or 10 seconds in between your intervals gives you this short amount of rest where if you take 10 seconds on the wall, your heart rate comes down a little bit and your muscles get that little bit of recovery. So by the time you push off for that next interval, you are refreshed and then you can get your technique back on track. So quite often when someone's going to a pool, swimming 1km, 2km straight, no change in pace, no rest in between, they start to fatigue and their technique and form begins to fall away. So if you can get used to breaking your session into intervals, even if it's 10 100s with 10 seconds rest in between, you'll find that you're much more likely to maintain good form and good form leads to speed and that speed leads to faster times in a race. So even if you feel like it's not as good of a workout necessarily because you've had some short rest in between, more than likely it's actually going to help you because you'll maintain your form and you've got to maintain form to maintain your speed. Swimming isn't only racing in the pool. There is a whole world out there. When I grew up, it was all about pool competitions and racing in the pool. Short course and long course. When I became an adult, when I started coaching adults, I learned about the world of open water swimming and swimming camps and swimming trips and just going for swims with your friends. There is so much more to swimming than just racing in the pool. And especially as an adult, you have so many opportunities out there to be able to do more than just race in the pool. So while I thought swimming was all about just going up and down in the pool, but in reality, there is so many other things that you can do. So if you find that I don't actually love going up and down the black line, while there's open water swimming, there's swimming holidays that you can take like our Maldives trip and our Thailand trip. There's so many other things out there that you can do if you find that following the black line is not necessarily for you. Simple drills equal fast swimming. Whenever I've filmed Olympic level swimmers, quite often they're all doing very similar drills. And they're not just doing that because that's just what they were taught. They're often doing it because there are a couple of drills that if done really well, have a great correlation between your swimming technique. So a lot of the drills that I see Olympic level swimmers doing, particularly for freestyle, a lot of them are doing sculling drills, single arm drills, and something like long dog paddle or underwater recovery freestyle. They're the main drills I see Olympic level swimmers doing as part of their warmup, because it can set up all those key things that they're working on. Lengthen the stroke, good catch and pull, the right rotation and connection within the stroke. So if you've got a good staple of drills that you can do as part of your warmup each session, and you know how you need to be doing them, then that can go a very long way to helping you progress in your swimming. What's the secret to staying consistent when you swim? It's absolutely fine to begin your swimming journey on your own. Going to the pool, trying to figure things out, and working it out and what you can do to get some a little bit further. However, if you want to be able to maintain your swimming and really stick with it, most people I've seen stick with it. They find a squad, they find a friend or a group of friends that they swim with. It's that accountability. It's that social aspect of it that keeps a lot of people in the sport. So once you get going and you learn the basics of swimming, it's worthwhile trying to find a group or some friends out there that you can go swimming with, because that's what makes it much more enjoyable. And even though it's a very solo thing to do, swimming up and down, you don't really get to talk to people when you swim. Outside of that, in the intervals on the wall, before and after a session, that's often when you get that social aspect of it. So if you can find a master's group or a triathlon group or something similar, that's often where people stick with it for much longer and find it so much more enjoyable. Learning to swim is frustrating and it's not very appealing to get to the pool. But once you get good enough at swimming, it's frustrating when you don't get to the pool. So whenever we learn a new skill, particularly something like swimming, that there can be a bit of a learning curve too, it's very frustrating in the beginning because we don't know what we need to do to get faster. We're not getting that enjoyable feeling of gliding through the water. And so that is where a lot of people stop and they give up on their swim journey. But once you eventually get over that learning curve, you get to the point where swimming is enjoyable and it's fun. Because you get that feeling of all that endorphin release after a good training session, get that feeling of gliding through the water, the water rushing over your arms and your shoulders, where you're going side to side. It's a very good feeling and you actually miss it when you don't do it. But it takes a while to get to that point. So if you can persist with your swimming for three months or six months and get to that point where it is enjoyable, that is when you're over that hard part where you actually miss it. Where if you don't get to a session, you're kind of frustrated that you didn't get to do it. The real reward isn't speed, it's who you become. I remember growing up, my dad was my coach. And every single morning we'd go into the pool and we'd train. He would always remind myself and the other swimmers there that there's no one else our age who was up at 4.30 in the morning, going to the pool early, training hard. We were doing all this stuff before most of our friends were awake. And so he made the point that it was about who we were becoming, the skills we were learning, that that's actually more important than getting good at swimming. Now obviously, getting good at swimming is a byproduct of doing all these things. But the main thing that comes out of it, I think, of getting good at any skill like swimming is the person that you become. It's the dedication, it's the commitment that it requires. And so there's so much more to it than just getting faster. And that's why I think swimming in particular is one of the best sports for most people to be able to do because they can see that progress. It takes a lot of effort and time and thought to be able to progress this for me. So that is why I think it's not so much about just getting faster, but it's about the person become by doing the hard work. If you're not sure what to focus on next, have a look at this next video where I break down freestyle in a lot of detail so you know exactly what to do to get faster.