Getting Started #4 – You Might Just Get What You Need

There's a question that's probably been nagging at you since you started reading this blog. It's the natural response to a guy who keeps telling you to swim less. And the question is this: how little can I actually get away with before it all falls apart?

It's a fair worry. Somewhere in your head is the fear that if you cut your swimming as much as I keep suggesting, you'll show up on race day undertrained, gasping, and sinking. That swimming less means getting less.

The surprising answer is that you give up nothing that matters when you train this way, because we're not cutting your training. We're cutting your waste. And once you learn to tell the two apart, you can get essentially everything you actually need from the water on a fraction of the yardage everyone else is grinding. Think of it as gaming the system. And it's genuinely fun once you get the hang of it.

Train To Adapt

Here's why the system is so easy to game. Every piece of swim training exists to produce a specific adaptation, a real, physical thing your body is supposed to get out of it. But most triathletes don't train the adaptation. They train the yardage, and just hope the adaptations come along for the ride. That's where most triathletes' problems begin. When you aim directly at what each session is supposed to give you, you can hit it with a tiny fraction of the meters, because you're no longer paying for a bunch of yardage that produces nothing.

So here's the test. Easy-to-moderate swimming is only worth doing if it's accomplishing one of three things: recovery, skill work, or aerobic conditioning. That's the entire list. A recovery swim flushes you out and keeps you loose. Skill work is technique and drills, grooving a better stroke at a speed you can control it. And aerobic conditioning builds your base engine. If a stretch of easy swimming isn't doing one of those three, it has no reason to exist. That's the definition of junk yardage: meters that aren't improving a single one of those three things. You're just moving water around and calling it training.

Don't Build Your Base Twice

And here's what makes this so powerful for a triathlete. Of those three jobs, one is already handled for you. Your aerobic conditioning is pouring in every week from the bike and the run. So the pool's easy swimming is primarily focused on the other two, recovery and skill. That alone deletes most of the easy yardage in a typical plan, because most of it was there to build a base you're already building somewhere else.

There's one more thing almost nobody accounts for, and it's the quiet killer of the "but I need the volume for fitness" argument. High-intensity swimming builds your aerobic engine too. Hard intervals don't just train speed, they drive real cardiovascular adaptation, often more efficiently than slow laps do. So when you trade a pile of easy junk for a smaller dose of genuinely hard work, you're not losing fitness. You're building it from both ends. The fast stuff makes you faster AND fitter, while costing you a fraction of the time.

The Goal Is To Get Faster‍

The goal isn't to swim as little as possible, like some sort of minimalist stunt. The goal is to get 100% of what you actually need while cutting the meters that were never doing anything anyway. Let's go through what that looks like.

Goal: an aerobic base. This is one of the three real jobs of easy swimming, so it's not junk, but you probably don’t need as much as you think. The average competitive triathlete swims 25,000 meters a week trying to build a base you're already building every week on the bike and the run. Stop paying for it a second time in the water. Side note, the exception to this is if you are injured and have to stop or decrease run or bike volume.

Goal: endurance for the race distance. The average athlete swims the full distance over and over to feel ready. You build better endurance through structured sets that develop it directly, without spending your life swimming slow, straight, and tired.

Goal: speed. The average triathlete just hopes it materializes out of all that volume. It never does. You train it on purpose, with short, sharp, high-quality sets that deliver the one thing volume can't.

Goal: actually feeling ready. The average athlete grinds more meters to quiet their nerves. You train the things that genuinely decide your race, the violent start, sighting, drafting, pacing, so you show up confident.

You can do this with every single part of swim training. Name the real goal, execute a set that works on it specifically, and skip the fluff.

Do More Of What Matters

I take every meter and every ounce of energy I save and pour it into the things that genuinely move the needle: race-pace work, top-end speed, threshold training. So on the categories that matter, I'm not spending 25% of the average. I'm spending more than 100%. My athletes do more hard, race-specific, high-value work than almost anyone, because they've stopped wasting time and energy trying to hit a high total yardage for the day.

That's the whole trick. You're not giving up your fitness. You're not giving up your race. You're giving up the waste, and spending what you save on the work that actually makes you fast.

Swim less, sure. But swim less of the things that don’t matter, and more of the things that count. Do that, and you don't get what you want, a Strava full of impressive but pointless numbers. You get what you need. A genuinely fast swim, and your life back.

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