With Triathlon Swimming Made Easy, we promise you can make swimming 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.
'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...