Getting Started #2 – How to Make Swimming Less Work For You

Let me clear something up before it gets me in trouble.

I spend a lot of time telling triathletes to swim less. Less volume, fewer junk meters, three hours a week instead of six. And somewhere out there, someone read that, cut their swimming in half, changed nothing else, got slower, and is now typing me an angry DM.

So let me be clear. You cannot just swim less and get faster. That was never the deal. If you take your sloppy, one-speed, going-through-the-motions swimming and simply do less of it, congratulations, you'll be exactly as slow as before. Swimming less only works because of what happens in the workout: more specificity, more speed, and better technique. The magic was never in the "less." It's in the what.

And to explain the what, I have to tell you about the most common mistake I see almost every triathlete make in the pool.

You Have Exactly One Speed

Watch a typical triathlete swim a set. Doesn't matter what the set is. Warmup, main set, cooldown, drills, all of it comes out at roughly the same pace. A sort of medium, moderately-hard, always-the-same grind. They have one gear, and they swim everything in it.

This feels productive. It is a disaster.

When the set calls for easy, they swim too hard. The whole point of an easy swim is to be genuinely easy, to recover or work on technique. But the one-speed swimmer can't help it, they turn the easy stuff into medium, burning energy they were supposed to be saving. Their technique never improves and then, when the set calls for fast, they've got nothing left, so they swim too slow. The one hard effort that was actually going to make them faster, the rep that mattered, gets swum at the same tired medium as everything else, because they already spent the good stuff grinding through the warmup.

So look at what happened.

They went too fast when they should have gone slow, and too slow when they should have gone fast.

They missed on both ends. The easy work wasn't easy enough to recover from, and the hard work wasn't hard enough to improve from. An entire session, all that time and effort, and it produced almost no adaptation. This is why so many triathletes swim for years and never get faster. It isn't the volume. It's that every meter came out the same shade of gray.

The Fix Is The Whole Game

This is where the workout itself does the work, and it's why the sets I write look nothing like a typical triathlon swim plan.

A good session has real range built into it. The easy parts are truly easy, easy enough that you actually recover inside the workout. The hard parts are genuinely hard, hard enough to force a change. And the whole thing is structured so that you arrive at the fast stuff with the energy to actually swim it fast. That's not an accident. That's the entire design. I spend the easy meters setting you up to crush the hard ones.

That's what "making the water work for you" actually means. It means every meter has a job, and the jobs are different from each other. The recovery meters recover you. The fast meters improve you. Nothing is wasted.

And here's the part my athletes always agree on: this is also just way more fun. One-speed swimming is boring. It's the same tired song every time, which is half the reason people dread the pool. But a session with real range, easy and sharp, controlled and fast, with a clear point to every piece, actually holds your attention. You're engaged because you're doing something, not just accumulating yardage. It lets me write sets a typical triathlon coach wouldn't touch, and it's why a lot of my athletes tell me they enjoy swimming for the first time in their lives.

Your One Job This Week

Pick your next swim and swim it with two speeds instead of one. On the easy parts, hold yourself back on purpose, go slower than what feels natural, as slow as you can with proper technique. Then on the fast parts, actually commit and go, using the energy you just saved. Feel the difference between the two. That gap, the real distance between your easy and your hard, is the thing that's been missing. That gap is where all your speed has been hiding.

You don't need to swim more. You've heard me say that a hundred times. But you do need to swim with intent, at the right speeds, in the right order. Do that, and the water finally starts giving something back.

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