How to Come Out WAY AHEAD by Hiring a Swim Coach

Here's something I see all the time, usually phrased something like this: "I want to get faster in the water, so I'm going to hire a triathlon coach. They coach all three sports, it's one plan, one person, nice and simple. Makes sense, right?"

For the bike and the run? Sure.

For your swim: NOOOOO! DON'T DO IT!!!!!

I get why the tri coach feels like the obvious choice. It's convenient. One coach, one plan, all three sports under one roof. And there's a comforting logic to it: most tri coaches learned to swim later in life, just like you, so surely they get it, right? They've been where you are.

That's exactly the trap. Because the thing that makes them feel relatable, learning to swim as an adult, is the same thing that makes them the wrong person to meaningfully improve your swim. Let me show you why, and then how to find the person who'll actually make you fast.

Let's Start With How Swim Training Works

Swimming is not running or cycling. This is the thing most tri coaches never fully grasp, because they came up in sports where the training logic is simpler: go this hard for this long, rest, repeat. So when they write your swim, they reach for what they know, and it produces sets that look busy but are broken.

You've probably swum these workouts. Let me show you the tells.

The Mixed-Goal Main Set

You'll get a hard aerobic set, and then, tacked on at the end, a random 4x25 fast. And it feels like training. But ask the simple question: what is this session actually for? Conditioning or speed? Because you can't build both in the same set. They work against each other. The conditioning fatigue compromises the speed work, so the fast reps aren't actually fast, and you get a watered-down version of both instead of a real dose of either. One focus per session. That's not a preference, it's how adaptation works.

The Undirected Drill

My personal favorite. The workout says "4x100 drill." That's it. Which drill? For what purpose? And again, what's the goal, are we improving technique here, or training speed, or building fitness? Nobody knows, because the person who wrote it doesn't either. Worse, it's often buried in the middle of a hard set, so you're drilling while exhausted. And here's what that does: when you drill tired, you drill badly, and badly-drilled technique becomes your technique. Drills belong at the start or end of a session, on their own, fresh. Mixed into a hard main set, they actively make you worse.

The Intervals That Aren't Really Intervals

So many tri coach swim sets are just "8x100 on :20 rest." Distance, rest, repeat. But that's not interval training, that's chopping a swim into pieces. Real interval work uses the send-off deliberately, controlling your rest so the set drives one specific adaptation, so you can measure it, so effort is actually rewarded. Most tri coaches don't structure rest that way because they were never taught to. They understand "break it up and rest." They don't understand why.

Put these together and you get the workout that bounces from one thing to the next with no through-line, the one that looks like ChatGPT wrote it. Not because these coaches are lazy, most work hard and care a lot, but because nobody ever taught them that a swim session is a precision instrument, not a to-do list. They're using run-and-bike logic on the most technical leg in the sport.

Then There's Technique...

Now the part everyone thinks of first. Teaching you to actually swim.

A specialist swim coach has something a late-learning coach simply cannot fake: felt knowledge. They know what a good catch is supposed to feel like from the inside, from thousands of hours doing it, so they can tell you not just what to do but what you should feel when you get it right. That's the difference between information and coaching.

They also teach in the right order. There's a sequence to building a stroke, kicking before body position, body position before catch, and a specialist knows it. A tri coach usually knows a couple of tips that happened to help them personally, so that's what you get, over and over. "One goggle in the water, one goggle out" when you breathe. It's not wrong. But it's one memorized cue, and if it doesn't click for you, they've got nowhere to go. They're a one-trick pony, not because they're bad, but because one trick is all they were ever given.

A real swim coach has a whole toolbox. If a cue doesn't land, they try a different cue. If drills aren't working, they switch to corrective swimming. They can spot the one thing actually holding you back, the thing that will unlock the most speed, instead of parroting whatever's trending online.

Because here's the dirty secret: swim coaches know all that surface-level advice too. "Fix your catch," the popular cues, the standard drills. That's just the entry-level layer. The specialist knows the twenty things underneath it, which one is your problem, and five different ways to fix it depending on how your body responds.

That's the whole difference. A tri coach is trying to get you competent enough to survive the swim. A swim coach is trying to make you fast.

How To Find The Right Swim Coach

Here's what to actually look for, and it's simple.

You want someone who put in the work themselves and coached others who did too. Ideally they swam at the collegiate level, so they have the felt knowledge and the technical depth, and they've coached swimmers at a club or college level, so they know how to build training that actually works, not just how to swim fast themselves. Those two things together, elite experience plus real coaching experience, are what produce a coach who can look at your stroke, find the one thing that matters, and hand you a session that's built for a reason.

That combination is rarer than it should be in the triathlon world, which is exactly the gap TRI Swim Club exists to fill. It's why our workouts have one clear focus at a time, why drills stand on their own, why every set has a job. Not because it's fancy, but because that's simply how swimming is supposed to be coached.

So when you go shopping for help with your swim, think it through the way you'd think through any real decision. The convenient option and the right option aren't always the same thing. Get a specialist. It's the difference between finishing the swim and actually getting fast, and at the end of your race, you'll be very glad you did.

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