How Triathletes Should Use Masters Swimming to Improve Swim Times

Swim leg holding you back? A faster swim starts here.

It’s no secret that swimming is often the weak link for many new triathletes. A lot of athletes come to the multisport discipline via cycling or running, and unless you grew up swimming, picking up that third sport later in life can be challenging.

But there are big gains that can be had by working on lowering your swim times, and Masters Swimming can help you access those gains faster and with a community of fun fellow athletes.

Why Masters is Better than Solo Lap Swimming

You can certainly improve your swim times by swimming laps at your local pool on your own. And sure, it’s easy to pick up a book with swimming workouts designed for triathletes (or download them from the internet) from any number of places. But there’s a few big differences between this DIY approach and swimming in a coached workout.

Live coaching and technique feedback

First, when you swim with an organized Masters program, you typically get access to an on-deck coach who will watch you swim and make useful suggestions for how to improve technique and get stronger.

Swimming is a technique-driven sport, and the more efficient your technique, the more likely you’ll be to meet your swim goals. Small improvements in body position, catch mechanics, rotation, or breathing can reduce drag and save significant time over the course of a longer-distance open water swim

But it’s really hard to do that on your own because you can’t see yourself when you’re swimming. Even if you have someone record you while you’re swimming to look at afterward, if you aren’t especially trained in swimming technique, you might not be able to recognize stroke flaws or know how best to correct them.

A coach can help. Plus, a coach can scale the workout to where you are now and what you want to achieve. This tailored approach to swimming can help you hone in on your weakest areas and strengthen them, elevating your overall performance. An on-deck coach can also give you suggestions for how to avoid injury and stay consistent with your swimming, which will only help you get faster.

Structured interval workouts

Structured workouts that focus on interval training also provide a solid framework for improving your swim times. Over weeks and months, consistent interval training builds speed and endurance, which will come in handy on race day.

Many Masters programs prioritize not just technique drills, but also:

• Pacing
• Interval training
• Stroke variety
• Sprint work
• Threshold training
• Recovery swimming

These varied workouts teach swimmers to hold faster paces under fatigue while improving efficiency. They can also help with injury prevention and balanced muscle development. All this variety will help you improve faster and more comprehensively than the endless long lap swimming that you might fall into when swimming on your own. And all of it can improve your triathlon swim time significantly.

Accountability and social connection

The positive peer pressure that Masters swimming provides—your lane mates who look for you to show up at workouts regularly—can also help you stay accountable and stick with the program. This is the social side of building stamina and speed and improving your triathlon performance, and it’s difficult to overstate how important it is to have a group or fitness buddy to train with.

Sports psychology research consistently shows that athletes perform better when training in a group setting than training alone. What’s more, training with similarly paced swimmers naturally encourages you to keep up and potentially make faster intervals. It also reduces the temptation to shorten workouts and provides immediate performance feedback.

Efficiency

Balancing training quality with work and life commitments is a major challenge for many athletes. But Masters Swimming’s structured sessions can help maximize limited training time by providing planned workouts instead of requiring athletes to design sessions themselves. In most cases a knowledgeable coach can help you complete the kind of high-quality training you need in less time than if you tried to design it yourself.  

Open water–specific skills training

If you’re training for triathlon, that most likely means you’ll need to work on sighting, drafting, and other open water–specific skills. Masters programs can help you learn and practice those skills.

For example, drafting is particularly difficult to train on your own, but many programs incorporate these sorts of drills into workouts regularly. And, having had that training can help considerably on race day when you’re faced with a scrum or drop into a faster swimmer’s slipstream and knock some serious time off your swim.

Invest In Yourself

It’s been said that some triathletes look to buy speed by getting the most expensive wetsuit or the latest, lightest bike. But consider investing in yourself by joining a Masters club and making your swim faster the fun way, one stroke at a time.