Myself and Katie were at the London aquatic centre on Saturday (18 March), aka the London 2012 Olympic Pool, for a lesson with Olympians, power couple of GB swimming and founders of Triscape David Carry and Keri-Anne Payne. Triscape is a health and lifestyle company that focuses on swimming coaching in various set ups and locations.
Before heading to swim, we had a chat with David and Keri-Anne about our swimming, why we do it and what we wanted to get out of the lesson. Katie wanted to know what dry land training she should be doing to compliment the swimming. I decided to aim high and request to swim faster, longer and without shoulder pain.
We made our way out to the pool and after a short pool side warm up, we plunged into our private lane and did a 300m swim, where we were told not to change anything yet but just to do our normal stroke. I can do that!
Over the next hour, we covered 3 key elements to “straight line swimming”, the triscape swimming method. We focused on our head position, breathing and rotation.
First thing to sort was head position. We had to stop looking forward. We watched a video Keri-Anne had taken of us swimming and watched David’s demo of the impact that his head position had on his body position and therefore, streamlinelyness (new word people – keep up) and it all made sense. I like to look forward whilst swimming, as I need to know where Katie is at all times for fear of letting her get too far away or even worse tapping her toes (not her favourite thing!), but as soon as I did put my head down, I instantly felt the benefits. It is going to be a difficult one to crack, especially, as we get closer to public lido swimming, where unless you know what is going on around you, you are destined to bang heads with someone.
With the rotation theory, while I couldn’t feel the benefits to the same level, a simple pool side demo from Keri-Anne to show the impact it has on your shoulder muscles was enough to convince me that this is the path to shoulder pain relief.
Soon enough David was sprinting 50m to check he still has “it”* and our time was up. Armed with our new technique we went into a public lane and did a short pyramid set to practice. We both promised to make sure we put time in our sets to focus on getting this nailed…otherwise we might have to book ourselves on one of their trips abroad 😀
We both really enjoyed our coaching session and we would definitely recommend the session to other swimmers.
*he does
TEAM Mermaids 