With Triathlon Swimming Made Easy, we promise you can make freestyle swimming (the front crawl stroke) the best part of your race. By adopting the Total Immersion approach to swim training, we guarantee you’ll be more fluid and relaxed in the water, saving precious energy for the bike and run, and ultimately much faster too. If having read Triathlon Swimming Made Easy, and maybe watching the related DVDs to, you feel the need for some hands on instruction, we can help you with that too, either through our weekend workshops, long established as the swimming instruction first choice for triathletes across the world, or by working 1:1 with one of our professional swimming instructors
'Triathlon Swimming Made Easy' - Another Laughlin Success!
Review by Laurie Kocanda
If you’re like most triathletes, odds are you consider swimming a necessary evil in racing. Despite time and effort spent training, you jump on your bike tired and winded from the swim, wondering how much of your race you just left in the water.
In his new book, Triathlon Swimming Made Easy (TSME), Terry Laughlin promises he can make swimming the best part of your race. By adopting the Total Immersion approach to swim training, Laughlin guarantees you’ll be more fluid and relaxed in the water, saving precious energy for the bike and run.
Part 1: Laughlin begins by explaining why, as a triathlete, you should not train for your swim as your do your bike and run. Swimming against the clock will bring nothing but fatigue, Laughlin writes. Instead you must "focus first on swimming easier, and let speed be a natural, nearly effortless, outcome of your increased efficiency. You will improve your overall performance far more by saving energy for the bike and run than you will by swimming faster." By relearning how to swim efficiently, you will become more fluid and balanced in the water, thereby limiting resistance, effort and fatigue.
Part 2: Next, Laughlin details the essential components of comfortable swimming. He explains why Total Immersion swimming is more effective than the standard eggbeater approach. By focusing on key elements like stroke length and balance, Laughlin replaces brute force in swimming with logic and awareness.
Part 3: With dozens of pictures and detailed instructions, Laughlin gives six lessons including 13 sequenced drills that teach us how to swim all over again. Much like poses in yoga, you start with simple movements and positions and work towards perfecting them. Only after mastering the full sequence, does Laughlin suggest working on full freestyle strokes.
Parts 4 and 5: Detailed training programs reinforce the lessons and drills from previous chapters. Readers learn how to consolidate stroke length and efficiency rather than "training energy systems." Effective open water training is addressed, including wetsuit use, drafting and sighting.
Terry Laughlin is an experienced coach and open water swimmer whose coaching philosophy focuses on pleasure, not pain. To the average swimmer, Triathlon Swimming Made Easy is 234 pages of hope.
Now it’s off to the pool...
TRIATHLON SWIMMING MADE EASY by Terry Laughlin
In 1989, I began teaching adult swimmers at Total Immersion summer camps and was soon teaching hundreds of improvement-minded swimmers each year. In 1991 I began writing for Triathlon Today magazine (now Inside Triathlon) and began to see so many triathletes at my swim camps that, in 1993, we began offering freestyle swimming workshops. Triathletes flocked to these and I recognized their powerful hunger for instruction in swimming technique.
In 1995 I published a book called Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster, and Easier, which quickly became the best-selling book on swimming. Though I didn’t write this book specifically for triathletes, thousands of multi-sporters made it their swimming bible and the number of triathletes attending TI freestyle workshops exploded.
Teaching thousands of triathletes has convinced me that swimming for triathlon (and swimming in open water) is a significantly different sport than competitive swimming (as in age-group, high-school, college, and Masters meets). While most triathletes copy the training programs of competitive swimmers, they shouldn't. Here’s why:
- Competitive swimming is done mostly in pools; triathlon swimming is done mainly in open water.
- Competitive swimmers have spent years gaining specialized skill and experience; more than 90 percent of triathlon swimmers are relatively unskilled and inexperienced in swimming, but still need to swim well now.
- Competitive swimming events are primarily 200 meters or less; triathlon swimming — and all open water swimming — happens mainly at distances greater than 400 meters, often much greater.
- Competitive swimmers need to swim with intensity; triathlon swimmers need to swim effortlessly.
- Competitive swimmers can be specialists; triathlon swimmers have to train seriously in two other sports.
Triathlon swimming truly is a unique sport with unique challenges. This book focuses precisely on how to meet them, whether you are a first-timer seeking the confidence to tackle a long swim in open water, or an experienced competitor wanting to turn swimming into the best part of your triathlon. Open-water swimming is also quite different from competitive swimming, and has far more in common with triathlon swimming than with competitive swimming. This book will also be a complete resource for those who want to enjoy success in open water, whether or not they cycle and run after finishing the swim.
The good news is that success at this kind of swimming is far less dependent on "swimming talent" than you might imagine, and is actually within reach of every athlete. By mastering a finite set of easily learned skills, any smart and diligent athlete can swim dramatically better. I’ll guide you through that process in the pages to follow. By following this special Total Immersion triathlon/open-water swimming program, you'll learn to coach yourself so effectively that, within a short time, you will:
- Stand on shore at the beginning of any race and KNOW you can make the swim distance — and make it with ease.
- Know that you don’t have to train as long or as hard in the pool as you thought.
- Know you really CAN master this sport that makes so many otherwise successful athletes feel unfit and uncoordinated.
Happy laps,
Terry Laughlin