Get Your Fluids

[Source: East Coast Cycos newsletter, in Tri-Rudy newsletter, May 26, 2010]

by Terry Laughlin

Think the pool is one place you can skip hydration? Think again!

Water, water everywhere, but are you drinking enough? When I look around at the pool, I think not. It's easy to assume that because you don't see sweat when you're swimming, you're not losing water. Not so. You not only sweat, but also sweat copiously, because your body generates lots of internal friction heat from the contractions of all those swimming muscle fibers. In fact, a majority of the calories you burn in the pool are body heat.

Prove it by weighing yourself before and after workout, whatever weight you’ve lost is all water. Sweat losses of as little as 2 percent of body weight, (or 3 pounds for a 150-pound swimmer) can dramatically hurt your practice performance. In fact, dehydration is far more likely to slow you down than energy loss, making water-loading far more important than carbo-loading, not to mention being easier. Yet, when swimming my daily TI practice (with a jumbo 32-oz. bottle of filtered water within each reach), I seldom see anyone in adjacent lanes quaffing rejuvenating water.

A study by Dr. Jack Wilmore, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas, concluded that for workouts of less than an hour, nothing beats water. But if you're swimming for more than an hour, fluid replacement drinks with electrolytes (i.e. Gatorade or Powerade) are absorbed into the bloodstream more quickly than water, thus hastening recovery.

Sports drinks are easy enough to find, having made their way from health-food and sporting-goods stores to the corner grocery. I settled on Gatorade, watered down to about half strength. I like the taste, which prompts me to drink more; I've had no digestive problems, and I've noticed a marked improvement during the latter half of a typical 75-to90-minute workout. And as I increase my swim time in preparation for the Manhattan Island Swim, I’ll probably put Endurox in my bottle for sessions lasting 2 to 3 hours to keep my muscles from getting glycogen-depleted.

Dehydration: Did you know that?

• 75 percent of Americans are chronically dehydrated – mainly because your body is low on water long before your thirst response alerts you.
• In half of the chronically dehydrated, the thirst mechanism is often mistaken for hunger.
• MILD dehydration will slow down your metabolism by as much as 3 percent -- that’s right you’ll burn calories and fat 3 percent more slowly if you don’t drink enough water.
• One glass of water satisfied late night hunger pangs for almost 100 percent of dieters in a Univ. of Washington study.
• Research suggests that drinking 8 to 10 glasses of water a day could significantly relieve back and joint pain for up to 80 percent of sufferers.
• A mere 2 percent drop in body water can trigger fuzzy short-term memory, trouble with basic math and difficulty focusing on the computer screen or printed page.
• Drinking five glasses of water daily decreases colon cancer risk by 45 percent, breast cancer risk by 79 percent and bladder cancer risk by 50 percent.

Down a quart? Here are five ways to make sure you’re getting enough:

1. You can sweat off 6 to 8 ounces of fluid every 15 minutes. At minimum you should take a healthy swig from your water bottle every quarter hour.
2. Want to be more precise? Weigh yourself before and after a workout. Each pound lost is a pint (16 oz.) of water loss. Next time, bring that much in your water bottle.
3. Pre-hydrate. Drink a liter or more of water during the two hours before swimming and 16 oz. immediately before.
4. Drink before you're thirsty. The thirst response comes only after your body already needs water. (Older swimmers note: Past middle age, we get "less thirsty." Exercise that drives a younger person to drink probably doesn't send thirst signals to an older person; so your risk of dehydration is greater.)
5. Energy-replacement (carbo-loaded) drinks during workout? Not necessary for a 2-hour or less workout. But if, say, you're getting on your bike afterward, use them to tank up.

What's The Easiest Way To Take Ten Minutes Out Of Your Swim Split?

Here's some fascinating GPS data from one of our Perth squad members, Daniel Tarborsky. Dan raced with his Garmin GPS under his swim cap for three of his major races this season just gone, recording the exact path he took. Click here for more information.

Pressing the buoy and not the T

[Source: East Coast Cycos newsletter, in Tri-Rudy newsletter, May 12, 2010]
by Terry Laughlin

There have been a number of threads in the last few months, debating some of the points in articles I've posted. One topic which seems to have drawn more comment than most is the idea of swimming easier and faster by "Pressing the T"

The idea is that the most common and frustrating swimming handicap is the dragging butt and legs. I suggested that it could easily be cured by leaning into the water on the chest, an action I referred to as "Pressing the T."

But that term seems to have struck many people as a bit obtuse, so I've decided to change the terminology to "Pressing Your Buoy." Here's what I mean by this and here's why it works:

Think of a water polo ball or something similarly buoyant. If you push it into the water, what happens? Right! the water pushes it back out.

We have only one place on our body that's similarly buoyant--the space between our armpits and behind the breastbone; it floats mainly because it has volume (Empty Space!) not mass. Most everything else on the body (except for body fat wherever we may have it) tends to sink. So let's call it our Buoy and it will prove far more valuable to us than the buoy we stick between our legs to keep them afloat.

If we Press Our Buoy into the water, the water will respond by pushing it back out. But we make the strategic CHOICE of what we're going to let the water push out. In this case, we choose to release the HIPS to the surface. It's that simple and costs us far less energy than trying to keep the hips and legs up by kicking.

Finally you add some counterweight to the sinking tendency of the hips and legs, by using the head. Your body in water is really a teeter-totter with it's fulcrum somewhere between your waist and your sternum. The longer heavier end naturally wants to sink. Your head, if kept connected via the head-spine line to the hips will act as an effective counterweight. In order to use it this way you have to avoid lifting your head to breathe.

Hopefully from now on when people refer on-line and elsewhere to this as "Pressing Your Buoy" there will be a higher level of common understanding.

A second issue in this discussion has been a certain degree of resistance among some of the more experienced and competent swimmers to the idea that balance is a big concern and that you need to take special measures to improve it. It's important to understand that most good swimmers, unlike the 90%+ of typical triathletes who didn't swim as kids, don't have radical balance problems to overcome and have over the years evolved intuitive ways of dealing with balance in the water. It's just not something they have to THINK about while swimming, anymore than they need to think about breathing. They just do it. So to suggest to them that they think about just gives them a headache. Besides which, experienced and accomplished swimmers are often reluctant to change tried and true ways of doing things. But. Matt Biondi, after he had already set multiple world records and won multiple Olympic medals, said that he felt he had learned only 10% of all there was to know about swimming we! ll. I've been swimming for 30 years myself, have finished 2nd at US Masters Nationals and am still learning more effective ways of interacting with the water, simply by being open to that possibility If I ever feel that I know it all about swimming, look for me to take up golf because swimming will at that point cease to be interesting to me.

Happy laps.